it’s a shame about all the things you lost after the dust settled
and the sulfur dioxide clouds shifted a few miles eastward
all the ashes scattered between timber bones
and we had to lay those bones to rest too, brittle as they were
i insisted on a proper mourning,
a proper grief:
(five days
in which we would not eat meat
and would wear only black)
this was easy for us, as i only wore black
to begin with, and you were a vegetarian,
and circumstances made up for the
things each one of us had
that the other did not. we met in the middle,
in this way;
your clothes were stained with soot, anyways, and the shelves
of every butcher and every deli
were emptier after the impact
than the fields in the foothills
a dead thing ceases in its use,
eventually. faster when the death is a hazard symbol,
a warning sign,
the tones slicing through the am radio and latching
onto our spinal cords
nobody planned this.
the man with a cardboard sign and an empty smile,
emptier eyes, fear hiding in the recesses
of his overblown overgrown worn out lungs,
begs to differ.
you look at him, eye contact as he spits
on the sidewalk.
we all three know he wishes it were your face
instead of searing hot concrete, your face against the concrete.
i kick a crumpled can, steel toe
into aluminum like it’s his kneecap,
watch it tumble into the road.
“then beg,” you tell him, and i toss my head
back and laugh all hyena-like at his sputtering contempt, and we keep
walking on that ceaseless march,
in that ceaseless March,
too hot for the season, away from
one broken horizon and into another
we’re driving down
the longest, flattest road this side of the rockies,
and we hate it as much as we love
the shattered mountain we left behind us.
we’re sick of sleeping on the couches of strangers,
of phone numbers dredged up
from long ago, six year gap
between the last message and now:
sick of being a burden, an inconvenience,
a walking talking two-headed four-handed
hazardous waste depository
trailing basalt in our wake
the sickness is in our bones now
where it can never leave, and
*prion* sounds a lot like *orion*,
belt somehow managing to fit him just
right for thousands of years even as
i have to cinch mine one hole tighter than i did last month
every ninth day another metastasizing tooth
and *terminal* means something different to us
than it does to everybody else in
the airport, in the train station, in the bus stop
in the rain
except maybe the woman hunched over
in her seat, three rows away, the crown of her head
identical to the slightly bruised,
just a little dented supermarket peach
clenched in her hand.
she gets it, she gets that same flash in her eyes
at the voice of the announcer
and it’s a miracle you don’t collapse
on the spot this time, at the familiarity of that
voice over the pa speakers, somehow just
the same as the oracle that announced
the coming of our long winding road to
inevitable doom
(i would still catch you if you stumbled. i would still
break your fall,
even as my own legs grow
more brittle with every passing day,
no matter how long i walk)