Even we, who seek tracks of elephants
better than our elephants; we, who fight
for things and always find our things aren’t things;
we, who so often bark as we do, paused,
could not have been there enough when he died.
We recognized it and that was enough.
Black blood settled stagnant in his body
like the molasses we dabbed with sponge sticks
on tongue, now aspirated, coating lungs.
– EMAHO, how you could perhaps describe
a popped corn in reverse, a self, dissolved! –
Now he knows. Thumb for the right passages
decide otherwise, hold a dead man’s hand.
Ten thousand recitations, what, for this?
Hear it just once, see it, you’ll be okay
in momentless dis – Pay attention! – tract-
ion? One final cloud eviscerated
by empty nucleus of unseen sun?
– Did you miss it? In this chilicosm! –
[om]
And now, upriver, streams a new now. – Rise,
a drop! – From this weaving runnel I want
to pull all the filthy water with me,
microbes and plastics alike, all this crap
in me, is me, in a mirror. And so
fade these thoughts I find myself forgiving.
Fading, I forgot my resting tremor,
forgot I’d forgotten how to swallow
pureed duck liver, honey-thick water-
gummed lungs, cruelly hyoscyamine-dried.
I conjure a dissolving deity:
something to do with the telling of time,
Something To Do with Paying Attention.
[ah]
My limping, hunched and aging illusion,
inspecting tracks, shivering in redwood
shadow nothing but mind, and not even that.
I, a leg with a brain, strive to recognize,
long for nothing, to liberate others.
[hum]
– A drop now crested! – when you feel no pain
that just may be it – Yes, at any time! –
futzing, this may just be it. Who are we?
a cold ugly dawn; we stayed up so late.
Coming home, returning to your mother
who is not – A drop settles! – your mother.
--
[2:30pm 4/22/25 - The Good Doctor is finally at peace]
I contemplate my own miniscule death
compared to his; his family gifted whiskey
yesterday–they did not know my practice.
I held his hand, one-eye contact, recited
the immeasurable aspirations,
saw his minute flicker of clarity.
