What is the nature of knowledge?

What still believes in ink and paper lives

beneath a cragged rock

answering to the names of law and whimsy

and the rules of county vital records.

With all the tenderness of dry toast

and burnt coffee make amends for your art

and for everyone else’s

failure. Small enough to fit in this box;

bad coffee in a paper cup.

                                               I walk across

the parking lot and let

my mind empty onto the empty concrete.

A mouse at a sweater yanks out strands

with no sense of the pattern it destroys. Only into

the clearest water can the ecstatic vision pour;

only the silenced mind

hears the sound the ghosts make in passing..

****

The first time you say “I love you” it means

“don’t go,” and it’s patently futile --

everyone leaves --

it’s as easy as a bus ticket or getting a day older.

Your children leave and they mean to, your parents

leave and they don’t. The bus stops,

the party ends -- everyone has somewhere to go.

I have these spaces to fill (birthdate. birthplace).

I am drinking cold coffee on a cold day.

Even funerals are a party. Potluck --

you bring your own contempt and unresolved

issues. People say nice things, mostly. It’s all

very generic -- macaroni salad, cold cuts. Pale

bread for the pale rider.

Later it will snow, just a little, and an argument

will start and then lie down under a card table.

On the death certificate you just write in

all the things you know

for all the questions they ask. Everything else

has to go somewhere else, sorry.

******

Burying the dead turns out to be just the start, just

the first thing we do with them.

After the first has taken the coffin away,

the second line carries you both home

on the ferry back over the river to the land

where nothing is ended, where

the dead walk back into the house with us.

We say it is love and dress them in ink and paper;

we say we are done but only meant this one part.

Don’t go.