The Move

Finally, Mother's frail health obligated the move to a ground floor unit. Years waiting for an apartment, same complex, opposite side. Six days wading through thirty years of memories, what to discard, what to embalm in fresh packing, what to conceal. The sixth day I walked through the room that had long ago been mine, summoning the brazen dead: the beautiful bouts with suicide, the sleeping girl once loved, the reams of words and miles of drawings---enough to plaster across each forsaken history. Closets bared like a soul denuded by war, the ugliness scoured from view. Nothing left to do but to unplug memory, shut down thought, and call up the manager to give it a once-over.

The Charnel Wheelbarrow

He guided it down the stone-paved streets each day, roll over bump,
in the blind Michoacán noon.
The cart was filled with slaughtered animals: pigs, wild geese; once, a goat
with beautiful blue eyes.
The man never spoke, although now and again he would cry out
a shard of some native hymn---to the sun, the basilica saints;
to no one at all.
After a few years, the curiosity died.
I no longer asked myself where he was ferrying
those small beasts, or to what totemic rite he was bound.
We all grow into our own carcass runs,
some less public than others.

On Seeing The Victorian Dead

They hold their recently dead children and try not to move
dressed in their crepe shiny best, the tiny hands
resting on chair-arm,
or nightgown or Papa's gentle grasp;

these are not aliens in sepiatone,
these are our ancestors, whatever the bloodlines;
they are telling us that we
must not wait for a final portrait
to embrace our beloved future dead.