YOUR OBITUARY

I am reading your obituary, calmly, by lamplight,

as if it were merely a poem I came across

in these old papers -- not the mundane list of facts,

dates, and names of survivors which we have

cobbled together on your behalf, and of which

you would most certainly disapprove --

but the one you wrote, long ago, for your

college writing class, when you were so young

and such an exercise must have seemed amusing,

a mere novelty to be redrafted and played with.

In this telling, you have become the survivor

of your own demise, able to alter, delete,

and transform the details of your life, just as you

liked to do when you were in the midst of it.

No one liked a good story more than you.

So, I am reading of your birth across the Atlantic,

how your very identity was kept a secret

before you were sent by steamship to be raised

by film stars deep in the Hollywood hills.

It's a tale you could almost make me believe,

and one that you certainly wished were so.

You are no longer here to say, your narrative lost

among the silence that now becomes a kind

of signature -- everything you have left

out, by choice or chance, or simple forgetfulness,

the once-red ink on brittle pages receding from view.

The ocean hums. Your fiction is safe with me.

SEARCHING FOR THE POET'S GRAVE

 

They are searching for Lorca's remains again

today, their big yellow machinery

nudging and clawing at the silent earth,

scooping out rows and rows of doorways

along this withered patch of soil.

Though no one is here now to answer them,

no one to say, No thank you, sirs,

I'm not interested in returning,

and your Bible is no map for my soul.

But they have not questioned the cloud formations

in passing, nor the monuments of generals,

nor the crooked olive trees, unwaveringly lazy

in their beauty, witnesses to all.

No one has called in the sun and moon

to spit out their long and secret songs, explain

their absence when needed most.

No one has yet knocked upon my door,

demanding to peruse the shelves,

where they would surely find the one they seek,

still speaking, unafraid, his linen suit

not even wrinkled.

But the workers, naturally, will go on

with their labors, long past sunset,

coming back empty handed, the shapes of

new countries emerging through their shirt-sweat,

while the poet just goes on dreaming,

as he did a hundred years ago,

the witnesses to his whereabouts

now seemingly everywhere.