| I owe God a death,
and the earth
a pound or so of chemicals.
Wallace Stegner
This
morning's mountain riffs
had nothing much to say beyond
the usual percussion to eternity.
This evening's moon parenthesis
is my admonishment.
Here I sit, two wives gone,
writing blue verse in a green time,
near a dynasty of deer
run to grief from overgrazing.
White-tails, so much like me,
trying in vain to turn a new leaf.
Who
was the old Tory that prattled
on about sweet death being the sole
reason to go on living? Which,
in the middle of my memorizing
this same square yard of ceiling,
comes back to me now, one year
after they Federal Expressed
my father home in a jar
from Davenport, Iowa.
I flew six hundred miles on empty
to get to him, caught the slowest cab
in the Quad Cities, but made it there
in time for dying. What remains -
cremains in the idiot idiom
of the huckster undertakers -
are five and a half pounds of bone
baked to finality, the ground
down ashes of love, my eighty-year-old
bog man who always joked
he would quit this siecle
before it hit the fin.
J Patrick Lewis'
poems have recently appeared or will soon be published in GETTYSBURG
REVIEW, DALHOUSIE REVIEW, WEST BRANCH, MSS., NEW LETTERS, SENECA
REVIEW, MUDFISH, the new renaissance, KANSAS QUARTERLY, SONOMA MANDALA,
SANTA BARBARA REVIEW, FINE MADNESS, SYCAMORE REVIEW, SOUTHERN HUMANITIES
REVIEW, TAMAQUA, SANSKRIT, LIGHT, YANKEE and many others. Thirty-five
of his children's books have thus far been published by Knopf, Atheneum,
Penguin Putnam, Harcourt, DK, Ink and Little, Brown.
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