A gym beside a nursing home.
But we can't call a spade a spade
for PC language rules the world.
Morning wind,
its wings of almost razor edge
slicing through your too light coat.
You roll the wheels that hold you up
as if there is a place to go
beyond the sidewalk's gritty trail.

We call bleached walls "facilities"--
running through your racing mind--
cosmic black hilarity
of life without the pose of ease.
I, with bones of crayon dregs,
you with folded envelopes
of flesh you wish to mail away
know better since the worst in health
has broken doorknobs--brassy will.

Funniness is a farm to plow
with what wild hairs are still on heads.
Denying truths they hide from us,
taming malice, making time a limerick
a tongue can sail through, forget.
Arms are skinny hangers now.
Weight of death a thing to press.
Attitude of anvils, shackles, bores,
and art, and recognition's window sill.

Mosaic made of crevices.
Skin's violin of violate.
Years just stacked like dirty plates
I thought I had to wash
and wash and rinse and rinse
and dry and try.
Cherish rhyming busyness
in kitchen nooks.
I'd peel the brown
off perfect mushrooms,
cook the noodles of my need
in olive oil so nothing stuck
to bottoms of a heated pan.
Stretch my dreams
to fit the waist of
gathered waste.
Examine all I wasn't then.

Think prettier, think happier,
think wealthier, think some
digression had to work.
A magic wand from dime stores
of a heritage revolving like
a ballerina on the roofs
of country clubs.
When effort stopped,
an angel roosted in burnt straw.
My arms now write
of aching gone.
I rarely labor at the stove.
And when I do,
you're peeling fruit,
dancing on the braided rug
because our hips have
touched and held
like glasses hug their wet insides.
Love is clean, hard to sort
from swamps we've lived.
Just an empty jewelry box
waiting for the flawless stone.

You're near that age
where death's a fact
as simple as a climate change
or graying hair, first the tarnish
then the bleach you've dyed
all spectrums lent to Autumn leaves.
Morning paper bleeds on palms--
another friend has "services"
you won't discuss and won't attend.
You know you need a hearing aid
but love the silence more than noise.
Slingshot jokes, firm dismissal,
stand like painted totem poles
we dance around in vagurie
when topics creak their open doors.
The final ax above the rooster's
spindly neck and ruffled feathers on the block.
As much a part of muggy sky--
mosquitoes in a jungle's net.

Things I drop upon a page don't rectify
but illustrate unwillingness to face
the tar-less, rocky road
of olding's fraught menagerie.
It's time to talk of selling toys you cannot drive,
of building rooms upon our house
where you can spend your final years.
Coddled, duly coveted in patchwork quilt
of wrinkles stitched around earned scars.
To let your children be the gods
and feathers of an angel's broach
that you have flown through freezing rain.
To let your children pass you
mounds of whipped potatoes,
recipes of edible time
with butter in their cavities.
Let them be the trump you've been
in hands of disappointed cards.

You read your menu upside down.
Complaining of your body's toil.
Skin once fertile soil in pots
is washing out with higher tides.
It was a giant among symbolic acts.
Cutting your meat,
watching it bleed on
linen napkins near your plate.

Spying rareness,
crimson water, ooze
into the spreading cracks.
Fleshly fabric, all its
strong elastic gone.
Lies are louder now
echoing lost artistry
so near a chapter's closing page.
Stains of pain unwashable for
simple deeds of dignity.

Eyelids crumble,
turn to salt and blowing sand,
dregs in bags of stale pretzels
meant to hold the trash of time.
I lead you through the parking lot
cupping china elbow knobs,
pretending that my passing youth,
a magic potient for the freeze,
can change the texture of the sea
away from waning miracle.

A physician can sometimes parry the scythe of death, but has no power over the sand in the hourglass.
- Hester Piozzi (1741-1821)

Father will say he is over your death.
Its tragedy a fact like vapor trails
from empennage of passing plane
(merging in the knifing wind)
proceeding onward with its job
despite thick clots of thunderheads.
He will say his will to persevere can rule.
That grief's communion was a rite
and not a right, a tearful byte
inside a pulsing artery.

But his eyes blinking moisture at the fire
argue awfully otherwise--
tether us to forgotten song he can't recite--
haunting smooth canoe on wave.
His heart more porous than his mind,
soaking in the bubble bath
of ways you passed him in a hall,
striking in your uniform,
a nurse designed to elevate
the bleeding finger, carnal stance.

Emotion is a rotted floor he cannot trust
with heavy boots of memory.
He sold the house he handed you
in sweet pretension, sour denial that
Fate would take you from his arms.
Loss of you--an ulcer brewing
deep inside a scalpel cannot rectify.
Its salt on every bower of bliss,
every wedge of cherry pie.
Termites under baseboard lies
do their munching silently.