Holy Departed

 I think I imagined 
   death would be beautiful,

an empty church, hallowed,
   darkened but still 

somehow alive. I did not believe 
   I would dry heave alone 

in the bathroom, thinking 
   how dead death looked. 

   It was the mouth, 
open. The tongue purple

   and dry. The eyes half shut. 
The body bent 

   back and the chest thrust
as if in great struggle.  
  
   What questions are most
appropriate here? Did any 

   one of us touch her? Could I 
even see her hands?




Desertification

Something about a boy who dies 
just after his fourth birthday, his brain ravaged 
like land cleared of itself, trees 
broken off and pulled like teeth,
like land left bare after such 
intensive agriculture 
nothing of what once lived could live 
there again. Of course the difference is 
the sweet boy died 
and we could hold his lifeless 
body in our arms, and he could cry 
from confusion and fear 
when the doctors strapped him down 
that last time to begin
the tests. Of course the real 
difference is he was a body not a place, 
though, if you ask his mother, she would say he was 
his own kind of landscape.




Fire Study*

Thick split logs of Eucalyptus

hurl smoke into a face. 
Release the damper and note
    
                             the change in pitch,
low whoosh of flame,  
mid-ranged cracks the opposite of ice.
    
What might surprise: coals, orange and constant—
    
                        *
    
               You wanted to be left whole, 
chips of chinbone free to fall apart.
    
I’m sorry. What we toss to the wind 
flies back into our mouths 	   powdered.
    
Do we detect a grit? The rift 
between ocean cliffs too far to fathom, 
    
the tectonic clip too quick, the grind 
                of land on land an itch
    
scraped so long the scar shines. 
    
                        *
    
What is the texture of ash on the tongue? 
The crematorium burns but bone does not 
    
break apart like skin. What remains 
is calcium, the hard crust, bone of bone,
    
the rigid, twisted bits.
    
                        *
    
On the sink board in the hotel 
    
               black ash 
    
like grains of granite. Cigarette smoke 
soaked into the sheets.
    
The window to the courtyard
a mouth screwed shut. 
    
I spend the night waking to the gasps 
of my own cravings.
    
                        *
    
                   If I could have had my way: 
the north coast, beach fire, 
saltpans boiling down to dust, abalone 
    
feast on the shore: wild mushrooms on toast, 
butter and garlic, mist, 
    
and water: breath catching, bone deep
    
                      cold, waves that heave
and heave, raindrops 
plopping in drift ash,
    
your own ashes clay colored, dry boluses and free bits,
swirling around us as we’d swim, our dive belts 
    
weighting us down
to the bottom.
    
                        *
    
I went wanting to know 
where the smoke goes. 
    
If the door had a window did the people ever look.
If the mandatory box burned first. If a flame at all. 
    
If the bits really did twist. 
    
If twisted how. If small how. 
If hard if porous. 
    
                        *
    
Sometimes all that is 
obvious is the black
    
peeled surface of the wood stove,
stripped of itself.
    
Now the flames quick and menace, the sparks 
catch on the rug, the heat 
    
envelopes, the dark surrounds,
the smoke rolls
    
thick up the flue.	
    
                        *
    
Now there are hardly any abalone left 
to harvest, the poor ocean snails so stressed 
    
they won’t eat. Red tide. Harvest ban.
Your ashes on the side of 
    
a mountain
whose forest just went up in flames.
    
                        *
    
                             No one promised 
you would get the life or death you wanted.
    
What if at the end nothing 
is what you believed you desired. The land and the depths 
    
capable of their own 
reinventions.
    
What if saying this allows longing
to spring up, a bacterial welcome mat,
    
a kind of cleansing that combusts
                             close to bone. 
    



*First appeared in Boston Review's No Nature issue