From my kitchen window I see on high,
Down low, a small and alabaster sprite
Whose concrete wings cannot flutter with a cry
But if wings could wipe tears, they might.
For he sits on top a sphere in the yard
With fists tucked under small and solid chin
And knees, as bounded and just as hard,
Steadies both like a shelled terrapin
With heavy load; he sits on top a hardened
World and I imagine he too weeps for
The dead. Weighted stone will not be pardoned
And he and I seem same to the very core.
Strewn around him, and around his world,
Littered like an archaic battlefield,
Lie many deadened leaves defeated, curled
In a purgatorial wait for what they’ll yield.
And these very leaves will after some time
Decay and dissolve into a dirt grave
Where future man will go to seek and mine
And look for the blackened gold they’ve
Come to need. He will dig and sift
Unless no future need to run his hard
Engines. But I sit and sometimes wish
My own soft engine, as flawed and marred,
The cause of the ghost inside my vessel,
Might, in quicker time, seep back to earth
Entombed alive as if oathed by vestals.
But what future use who knows what worth?
But this is all folly, just another Hamlet act;
I will not make the move. I too am deemed
Haunted by a ghosted sight; also racked
By a regretful pain felt hard and keen.
From a nameless cliff I see on high, down low
The rumbling, streamlined lines of a naval ship
Whose dead grey hue turns to smoke as it goes
While it’s soul rumbles under as it rips
Through indifferent seas. And I on a wake
Lie lifeless in the stormiest reach
My own sail as torn as the heart it navigates
Thrown toward the shore of the loveliest beach.
Then I imagine my father with outstretched hand
Like the old Book's last fiery scene
With one foot in the water and one on land.
Atonement thirsts on the oases of dreams.
It has often been said death is not proud.
Nor would I fain to say he is even smug.
But while it’s I that’s full of fury and the sound,
Death took—and takes--with stony shrugs.
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