Poets,

 

Find your poem in a woodstove. Don’t trust a
poet who’s remembered his father’s liquid
nitrogen hands or seen the undertaker thieve his
deadman snot with a scalpel. Could you choose
the casket? Have a favorite casket? Keep a
burial stone for sentiment. (Mine’s red
sediment, leaves bloodrust on fingers.) Be the
eulogist: at breakfast; at the DMV; with a
human signature on your lips, in your
bellybutton – your first bare trickling fresh
specimen; when you sing; in the dogfood aisle,
the casket aisle; when you finally learn to
drown; at the Botanical Garden; when you see a
real slug, not a snail not a caterpillar a slug; at
Lord & Taylor when you’re Bogart in their
finest funeral Calvins; from your first beating to
the first you dish out. Remember: stones remain
and hibiscus, the US NAVY and Damascus.
Find your gray in Damascus.

All my love,

James