He's Dead

I’m dying to weep for Francis Sweeney,

dead in his eighties, a little too young

   for me, I’m hoping for a longer stint

on earth; lot’s to do ‘fore the last dog’s hung.

   It’s a life of oglemoon and sunsquint

         into the dark finis―

manufacturing that aesthetic thrill,

   so long as it doesn’t pay you dim sum

   at all. It’s only ripe as freedom,

a door you open into a deep hill.

A drop in the salmon ladder really;

what do you reckon in earthly years?

   O, rare fertile roe in my wake when I rowed

the fishful of dreams unweepable tears

   to your little son over the charred road,

         which looms ungenteely.

Just beyond where the voltage sags the clay,

   someone holds a picture of your mother.

   ―This is all that’s left, they say. But smother

any concern, for you are well on your way.

  

At my deposition, Fran, you sported      

a bow tie! Some legal types, suing for you.

   I never did learn how it all turned out.

We went on to live as if this life were new;

   I put the melancholy ash to rout

         but it merely loitered

between our plots of brain material.

   There must have been a hole in your fabric

   the shape of his last moments, a rubric                         

I repeat, now that you’re ethereal.

My elegy for the elder binding

tie makes glaring the strangeness of my truth,

   a thing received of each sole emptiness.

My breath and selfish ways have gone aloof,

   so must it be, the very thing you bless―

         This is the last finding.

Somewhere in a library, bowdlerized,

   because they’re each one’s untouchable quinx,

   are books printed in invisible inks,

weightless tomes, imperfectly realized.

Somehow this has to do with Solipsism

because the very Greeks of knowledge light

   up like little planets going round me

when I catch them in my sundance flashfright.

   Which is to cry “I’m buried here, Sweeney,

         under a head schism."

I can wait with dignity forever

   if it means the non-believer suffers

grace as it pours it’s hail on strange, never

   to know for certain if it will snuff hers.