Springs Aren’t the Same

You will weep, or we’ll know why.
Death is not the source of grief;
Words are, as life is the source

Of the pain. The springs are not
The same. Grief is not a spring
At all, it is the Monks’ Bridge

On Man, each word a round stone
Fetched from the bed of the stream
That falls from the springs of names.

You can use that bridge to cross
From your own loss to the loss
That first broke you as a kid

And breaks you next, on your own
In your fine, gold world gone wan,
Ghost on your own as you go.

Doves on Toast

He liked to eat, when he could
Get them, to fill his large self,
Low, or less, on feck, Key West.

Who knows what to make of him,
Now, plain, dull man in a suit,
Smooth of jowl and pale of skin,

Who would bore us all to death
And had no claim to have lived
A life of hurt or great worth,

One more staid, plump, smug, white man
Lodged in a good job, nice house?
Who would want a poem from him

Now, when it’s true most would not?
If he could have been real, bad,
Sexed, vile, a kill-or-be-killed

Kind of a straight man, well, then
One could read his life and love
To hate him. It’s just the poems

That seem to come half from him,
Half from Frau Goose, and a half
They can’t have from gods and wings.

A man’s man punched his lights out,
Man’s man with a girl’s sore heart.
He got up and wrote some more

Feck in Key West, rode the rails
Back home to his own bare heart,
That cold ding an sich and such.

Gain

You got to take what you learn
And lose it, but don’t lose it

All or too much, too soon. Let
It slip off and find its own

Way out of you, like a cat,
Like the child you raised from scratch

That claws at the screen to go,
That sneaks off to find bad kids,

Or what you fear will be bad
In the night. Out in the night,

What you learned will learn to fend,
Will grow up, will fail or thrive

And then fail, as all life must.
For a while, it comes and goes,

Fine. Then one day, all you’ll know
Is what you learned won’t come back.

Wind in Dark

There are no words
In it, just sound.
You want to say
It’s like a voice,

But all the songs
And calls of life
Tell you it’s not.
It’s like a sea.

It’s like a road.
It’s like a coast—
Not what it holds,
But how it pulls.

It blew all night,
And what blew through
Lost souls of voice.
Death’s on the move.