Mouthful of earth, hair half a century silvering, who buried him.
With what. Make a fist for heart. That is the size of it.
Also directives from our DNA.
The nature of his wound was the clock-cicada winding down.
He wound down.
July, vapid, humid: sails of sailboats swelled, yellow boxes
Of cigars from Cuba plumped. Ring fingers fattened for a spell.
Barges of coal bloomed in heat.
It was when the catfish were the only fish left living
In the Monongahela River.
Though there were (they swore) no angels left, one was stillbound in
The very drawer of salt and ache and rendering, its wings wrapped-in
By the slink from the strap
Of his second-wife’s pearl-satin slip, shimmering and still
As one herring left face-up in its brine and tin.
The nature of his wound was muscadine and terminal; he was easy
To take down as a porgy off the cold Atlantic coast.
In the old city of Brod, most of the few Jews left
Living may have been still at supper while he died.
That same July, his daughters’ scales came off in every brittle
Tinsel color, washing
To the next slow-yellowed river and the next, toward west,
Ohio-bound.
This is the extent of that. I still have plenty heart.
