for some Americans passing.

Before I get too comfortable on your couch,

pull my Bostonian's off, slide

my feet, still twisting in those brown

dress socks , over the Saxony rug

your mother washed with Tide,

the spot your dad would sit eating his

dinner and rooting for the Pirates

and if you could unearth the origin of everything;

shadows, the refusal to accept as true

that all our dad's have gone on now,

yours being the last to go

but needed two live in nurses,

to get his story out perhaps. To

document the stuff younger minds quickly

forget.

Then we got the call, and it's always a call,

not a flyover drone or a Mitsubishi A6m Zero

(where you could see the pilots goggles)

in that battle of the eastern Solomon's in 42.

Or a glistening sign on the side of a goat

announcing your passing.

Or any  Greek goat, naked but unharmed,

walking thru that order of peonies

then turning to suckle the baby Zeus

as Amaltheia did, nursing him with milk

in a cave on Mount Ida. And like all

the nurses I've known, forever

placed among the stars.

Reviews

[writing mojo]

these are some choice pastures to feed on,
when blindness eventually
becomes umbilical to the mind..

[W.k.kortas]

What sticks with me, aside from the marvelous valedictory tone of the piece (and speaking of things we can put on each others tombstones, my friend...) is the easy transition from the everyday tangibility of Bostopians and Tide and the Pirates on KDKA to the stuff of myth and legend, without a hint of the cloying or the jarring. Masterful and top-shelf stuff.