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He preserved by forty years
every day of
work
toil
gulping honey browns –
Now filled with daughters,
lockers of deep sea tuna steaks,
purple hearts,
Bricks and two-pane glass sit portrait-cast
framed in brittle gold leaf,
The still postcard of
a life well-earned
and quiet.
Collapse.
One last wind humbly offers
the final sweep of leaves
to the bone white curb.
Photo by Edward Cohen.
Clown’s hair on fire,
Rainbow is burning – child cries,
What have we become?
Photo by Edward Cohen.
A cat sits quietly
screen door dreaming
as charcoal winds swim in,
Quiet,
simple it begins
as we melt to
paper thin fog on the
yard’s edge.
The scent of past prime jasmine flowers
Hangs thick on anxious air
Bloomed this day while I am gone,
In my heart
Someone has cut
A small hole
So all passion’s fierce bile
Has leaked out,
Soaked deep now in embrace of earth
Coursing like molten veins,
A dusty quiet fills my mind
Sprinkled on scattered paper piles,
All these thoughts have hushed to hear
The sagging sigh of sleep.
Photo by Edward Cohen.
We move through
Time
like
Children in raincoats
Marching home from school,
Their tails trailing long into the evening
Faintly recalling spritely morning showers,
Devoid of time’s impermanence –
The catharsis of past
Deeply repulsed by the soul,
Only when the partition of sleep
Wakes dawn in the spirit’s chest
Drowsily do we shake off its crystallized remains.
In a tea cup
Lives a crack
A child charting a sea of grass,
To claim its proper path,
Where does it go
When its house is dispersed
Back to mosaic earth?
I cling to his shirt
Like a young grape
Plucked from a hearty vine
Dragging with it the stem,
They urge her to check off more boxes
That each one will serve as a conduit
An umbilical cord from Heaven
To Jerusalem,
A reminder
So that each piece – cornea,
Kidney, marrow, tissue,
Will be another small peephole
Through which one could look
To observe a diorama of paper mache
And flesh,
It is bright and warm
A screen door keeps the flies outside,
A single cloud drifts lifelessly across the sky
Punctured here and there,
Intensified light
Radiating through,
I hold on tight to cover the missing spots.
