The Last Fugue

That’s the way it sounds to me
My hand dragging in the water
As you bow her violin in key
We laugh and drink Vichy water

My hand dragging in the water
The contrails in the sky
We laugh and drink Vichy water
You say her name, but I don’t cry

The contrails in the sky
Hang like my heart in stasis
You say her name, but I don’t cry
I give you my last quarter with two faces

Hang like my heart in stasis
Until it bursts into a fistful of coins
I give you my last quarter with two faces
Throw it in her grave, I enjoin

Until it bursts into a fistful of coins
As you bow her violin in key
Throw it in her grave, I enjoin
That’s the way it sounds to me

What Happens on Sycamore Street

She waits in a house at 743 Sycamore Street
where the sun shines so brightly on the sidewalk
it looks iridescent and pink morning glories bloom
all day long in shadows, where a cat prowls silently
between houses, terrifying song birds, and at last
she admits she is waiting to die.

“My sweet potatoes, planted this spring, didn’t die
even though we suffered drought, but up the street
Mrs. Hoover’s fall-bearing raspberries didn’t last
the summer,” she says as she looks down the walk.
What she doesn’t say, what remains silent,
is how she wonders about her own fading bloom.

Her groom holds her hand, a mottled bloom
on his cheeks. “Nineteen years and…” but his voice dies
away as he thinks ‘til death us do part silently.
The cat chases a squirrel across the street
just as a Honda drives by. Squeals, then driver walks
around the front of his car, looking at the last

chase Fresko will ever enjoy. With effort, at last
he leans over and picks up the body, lays it in blooming
asters growing in the boulevard, wipes his hands on the sidewalk
as if the roughness will cleanse his palms. His is a die-
hard attitude, no need to find its owners; cat was in the street,
what can they expect. In 743 Sycamore, they watch silently.

“Do you think,” she asks, breaking the silence,
“that our neighbors will come to the funeral, my last
big show,” she adds with a tepid smile. “I’ll throw a street
party,” he says, “but I am a madcap, my love, my blooming
rose. Let’s us a party today, tonight before evening dies!”
Outside a small girl cries, kneeling on the concrete sidewalk

skinning her bare knees. Her father lifts her up and walks
down the road, crossing Sycamore, while mother silently
trails behind holding a blanketed ball of cat, now dead.
“Wrap me in a shroud like that cat when I die,”
she claps a hand on her mouth, shocked by her last
comment. He wraps his arms around her, sniffs the bloom
of her hair, freshly washed. “Tonight, babe, we party in the street.”

All things living will die, but how long we walk
on this Earth, how many streets we silently
traverse until our last is a bloom that cannot open until it drops.

Moving to Hospice

Arlo sings to me right now,
Can you dry every tear...take every hand that death has consumed?
I know Barbary needs a hand
when her sister passes she'll have a river of tears
that not even my cupped hands will hold.

My dog stands behind me
She's crying and pacing
for her boys, my boys, who have gone
out to play in the field
outside the gate where she can not go.

The sky is light blue, dusk will soon fall.
I see our willow tree greening up along
its strands that hang like pearls,
like a rasta-man's dreads swaying in the wind.
The willow is dying, too.

Now Arlo has played the last notes of
"Gambler's Blues" and the people clap
their hands, whistle. I'm sure they smile
to one another, nod their heads, sigh.
But what of Barbary's sister?

Maybe she's sighing, too.
Maybe she's listening to Arlo right now
remarking in her head how she used to
listen to Guthrie when he first started strumming.
She sighs, knowing he'll keep strumming
even when she no longer can listen.

Memory

That was a bright and bitter day
The phone rang
She called, for the last time,
simply to say, "I love you"
and nothing more.

It took me a moment
to grasp her message
the way her breath caught
like snowflakes on lashes
a thistle seed on argyles

But when at last I understood
her meaning,
it was too late.
There was nothing left
but an empty dial tone.

Sail Away

I’ve had my ear to the rail forty-six days and counting.
Three yards up the line, my sister huddles,
waiting, same as me.

Hearing something
I jerk my head up,
study the horizon.
But, no, it is nothing,
perhaps the whine of an airplane overhead;
its contrail divides the sky in half.
My sister clears her throat.


In the alfalfa field small birds
like warbler and nuthatch, flit from stalk to stalk.
I lay my ear down once more.
The steel rail warm and soothing against my skin.
Its smoothness is like a sharp, sharp blade,
ready to slice a tomato.


Now I hear rumbling.
Under the palm of my hand, vibration.
With my head on the trestle,
I see a plume of white, smoky steam
unfurling in the sky.
A finger pointing,
but not at me.

The vibrato becomes a shuddering.
The grumble, a deafening roar.
I crouch,
horrified and immobile.

With a scream, the locomotive is upon me,
shaking me senseless like dice in a cup.

Yet it misses me,
as if I were invisible.

I sit up after the last car passes,
watching my sister as she sails away,
her brown hair laughing with the wind.

-------------------------------

I'd published another version of this poem much earlier in this blog's life. It's here now, closer to its final form.

Cajun Music as a Rectifier

Nothing could stop carcinoma cells from multiplying as they sought to dominate her healthy cells. She lay in her hospice bed, lungs gurgling, oxygen elusive. Then she was quiet.

He played his fiddle five-hundred miles away. The tune once belonged to his friend, hit by a car, dead. I listened to the song on the radio, fingered my imaginary strings, stroked with my make-believe bow.

Then the segue, the bridge to move from melancholy to exuberance. I rode along, sitting on the E-string, swaying to music neither my sister nor his friend would ever hear again.

His music mended me.