Gone Everywhere

The news was Luke –
through my fingers. Out of my fists.
Beyond me then, but there in every room.

He’d caught the ball and thrown it back a bird.
We saw it prismed out,
heirs to each other’s confounded love.

Knocked in, shock’s bruise
budded in the chest, tangled the stomach,
bore blossom.

Grief’s Utopia

The entertainments for the dead began:
repartee, scribbling, an in-joke with the ghost.

Where’s Luke? – that impulse again,
but this time like a tired joke with myself.

The bass note every now and then of
what was happening to his body.

My love like a red ruse.

*

Rolled
over, got dawn in the eyes,

caught the colour spectrum.
Rolled my head to roll
the rainbowed light
around my pupils.

Sat up,
saw wind
fountaining the oak.

*

Converged on the house, we were a vortex.
Memory on memory plunged past
with arms upraised.
Love was rushing to salve as if to save.

Beneath a weight of June blossom,
telling stories
we watched him go
as if letting him.