cloudy and distracted,
that scanned a chiseled beam
for cherubim and seraphim
you doubted there, yet praised.
Your friends will miss you–
your mind, intimate as a razor,
or filling an audi torium,
the pitch of your guttural tenor;
cafes, bars, and canals
all stand emptier,
your death expanding space
to the sinister proportions
of loss, of a vacant face.
Yet anchored in a sigh,
in the backwash of a whisper,
poetry will survive,
since loss becomes it-
like a cold its nasty cough,
or breath the tenor's note;
like a daughter's hidden love
for smoke that drifts within
a window's sunlit moat.
III
Poet, if you're near,
look down upon these lines,
as another criminal year
cuts its teeth on sorrow,
as another millennium spills
into the new one's zeros,
as another decade fills
its quota of corpses, sutures,
as terror's partisan love
trades in wreckage like futures,
while you within the spheres
in neutral exile rest-
one through whose part of speech
the language lived, was served,
and by whom its truth was blessed.
