Edwin Arlington Robinson's old man
Dug a grave in the woods
For his old Amaryllis to lay.
But amaryllis' are only one type of flower,
So where do the azaleas go when they die?

Do camellias have some second home for the winter?
Do they begin to pack unseen bags
As their peddles wilt and fall to the ground?

Do they ponder whether to stay?

What too of the pink silk from my crepe myrtles
Or the flowers of my magnolia?
Or, any of the many other blossoms of beauty
That spring to our lives
Only to fade from thought.

What about Mary of Muscatine?
She too was a colorful bloom
Rescued from a drowning car in the 30's
To meet me forty years later.

She brightened the eyes
And the imagination of my young life.
She taught my childhood lessons on canvas,
And outlined beauty through her brush by hand.
But then she vanished before I could ask,

Am I still her student now that her season has
many times passed?

What rings louder in my ears
Than all the traffic outside
Is the same question I have of flowers:

Where did she go when she died?

Does one dig graves for flowers
For their blooms, and my memories to fall?
Or, can I only try to capture
That vanishing image in my mind.
Clinging to it with an eyes closed smile,
But, too slow to notice it fade?

Where do flowers go when they die?

Perhaps I should go into the woods like Edwin
And ask them before the season gone.

In August, like one in a sea
of gunmetal blood cells, I flowed
south, packed tight and hot in a van
with family-mother, grandfather,
grandmother-folded in
next to the sticky plastic of beach chairs,
the sharp, jabbing lumps of baggage.

In the box, our smells mingled
with sunscreen and warm, smoked turkey
bought as an offering for relatives
fragmented to the North and West
converging on the shore of Mobile Bay.

In my twelfth summer I spread
a map of my state upon the floor.
Alabama lay lumpy, creased, mostly square
but for leaf-like growths fingering the Gulf.
Across its bleach-white skin
highways, interstates, county roads
crawled like arteries, 65 the aorta
pumping traffic from Birmingham,
metropolitan heart, to Mobile,
fingertip of coastal extremity.

it is what it is
is what i like to say
when i think and
i hope
and
i laugh
and
i pray
that you know
as i do
that this was never
the way
i intended to pay
for whatever i did
on whatever day
always unknown to
me, you and they

to involve you
or not
if you please,
if i may,
you should know
i should say
before you're too far away
it was not
is not
it will never be
none of it is...
okay.

he lived by his own set of rules
and only followed those
when they didn't interfere

if he wasn't at work
he had only one outfit
a pair of cutoff wranglers
to be fair i'm not sure
how many pair he had
but it seemed like only one

i assumed he also wore
something under them
but that was it
no shirt no shoes no service
anywhere he went
just cutoffs
and an occasional comb

if mom wasn't watching
he would accessorize
with a cigarette and
a can of miller high life

even in the hospital
before the surgery
he would go for walks
in the halls in nothing
but those tattered shorts

how fitting that they
were the last real clothes
he ever wore
that by the time
he had to wear that
awful blue-grey suit
they put him in
his spirit was already free

it took three years of college
to find the right mix of guys
to form a band worth caring about
worth pouring my heart into

we started rehearsals about
a month before i left for oxford
it wasn't long before people
would come over to check us out

drew was one of the regular visitors
sitting there in his standard dress
watching us work to master songs
other bands wouldn't dare

two such songs would become our
trademarks until we wrote our own
boston's foreplay/longtime and
kansas's carry on wayward son

these songs required hours of work
and serious chops singing and playing
but all i can remember now is
watching drew sing along as he listened

carry on my wayward son
there'll be peace when you are done
lay your weary head to rest
don't you cry no more

I can still smell them.
Every last one of them.
I wonder
Can they still smell me?

I've done things,
Things that I didn't want to do.
I felt, no feel repulsed with myself,
But that's what's expected of me,
A man, traveling alone.

I wish I could never take this ring
Off of my finger.
I do too much wrong
When it's left
On the bathroom counter.

________________________________________

twilight is a time
of intermingling light
and dark where beauty
resides however unwelcome
and though the victor
is predestined by the diurnal
it is an internecine drama
beyond the reach
of shakespeare's pen
or fellini's lens
it is a time
that opens perception
inviting us to see
not in spite of the darkness
but because of it

a mockingbird behind me
impersonates the nightingale
and then the blackbird

which causes my mind to stumble
among tropes of emptiness and fear
and find itself alone

i look for god
in the pages of a book
and find comfort
in the longing of duino
and dover beach

you were
all these things
with a person
who calls herself
my friend
and
i was not
jealous
but resentful--
the ugly thing
i rarely am
in my waking life

my heart raced as i slept
watching the person
i tried to make you--
the person you are now--
through closed lids

my subconscious self misspoke
and i lashed out—
questioning aloud
too loud
your motivation--
or lack of one
concerning me--
and i realized,
your face spattered
with an inability to
save my own,
none of it
concerned me...
anymore

i awoke with a start
angry with myself
for being so transparent
even beneath a thick
blanket of unconsciousness
and jotted this down
dazed
under the spell of
my own sad reality
my dreams are
never really mine...
after all

SBW