Morningmusic’s Song

On most days, it is easy to be reasonable.
Blood pumps without complaint, viscera remain intact,
meals slide in alimentary splendor right by the heart.
Cell by cell the body, industrious, pursues a pointed task: to live.
But on this day, my brother, a deep eyed boy,
pulsed to the metronome of nodding poppies in a Turkish field.
He was found strewn, like a broken flower, upon a stranger’s green tiled floor.

I remembered Maudie Greene and how we found her, years ago, lying on her back,
all sixty pounds of ancient bones and mini skirt hiked way above her brittle knees,
her tiny ass still planted in a yellow vinyl chair, toppled mid-meal into silence.
The radio cried help for three days before we broke the window to quell its screams.
We waked her in the stairwell, all eyes on Maudie, sprawled.
The next day, tossed to the street, her common things, little gogo boots akimbo.
I kept a metal cabinet, my children call it Maudie’s, it was the best that I could do.

These bags, the ones they gave me from my brother, are too heavy, smoldering.
I’m embarrassed. I wasn’t ready for them, can’t explain them to you.
“Count the contents,”I was told, “before you leave.” I longed for help.
The jeans were ravaged, puzzle ring undone, the belt too soft and thin.
The boots, I swear, were warm, had swallowed unmatched socks.
A filthy shirt, unfisted, it’s chest agape, is silent, round, disconsolate as a bald eye.

I am inhabited by a cry and ask you, please, to help me carry the bags,
by reading these words, so that something in all of us will continue to breathe.
My bones are showing, seasoned to dry wood, my heart burns and threatens to illuminate
the long shadow of night that stretches beneath the too long fingers of the day.
I am a humped-man shape, scrabbling through paper bags, a scavenger of small scraps
and bits of lives that blind us in their light, shackled by the indolence of memory.