Garden of Gethsemane, under your Mount of Olives,
The green-pitted translucence of night, where Christ,
Seer-in-knowing, writhes at the split seed of fission,
Break of night into the morning blossoms of Hiroshima’s ash,
Of mercurochrome and zinc oxides and the red snow of skin,
And his resurrection, forever once-again, in atomic flash,
The smells of honeysuckle and hay of manger,
And his breath of molten potash.

What is to say beyond the poplars,
But the dry mouth of her death,
Like the hoarded provision of an echo,
Somewhere far off in my being,
Where darkening moves up the stone step,
Each footprint like her powdered breath,
Her shuddering voice channeled through my throat,
Shattered like frozen buds blown to the faceless snow.

Death has one gleaming eye transfixed to the comings of fathers,
The second one to mothers is bound.
Make no suture or stitch to its blood-seeing.
Death, when you took the first mother,
The last son your undoing avows.

My grandmother had forgotten everything but the ability to be good,
Innate courtliness sitting like a castle upon a moor.
Her world of insensate rains and fogs and heaths,
And still the hearth flickering from her lost eyes.
My grandmother whom I adored, to all the world,
Your goodness will go unnoticed into night,
Just as your eyes stared unknowing
Before the subsuming of tides,
While the world blasted through your bones,
Breath without force of inspiration.

Here, love is the far proxy of look
- She is dying a distance -
Yours travels from brook to sky
To the heaven wanderings of death in my blood,
The black smoke-congested veins possessed
By the baffled realms of battlefield
By the horrors of the mundane
From this old mouth, emptied of kisses.

She walked out of the watercolor storm of a fresco
Like a cowl-bound form in a light drizzle of rain,
Her mosaic tiles of ancient lovers’ eyes, ceramic-borne,
Just as her hips held the curves of the urn, kiln-fired,
The coiled heat of Greece still stinging through her flesh.

For her, the treetops had been the summoners of storm,
In kind, she poured down the wet grove of her hair, electral,
Pantheress of humid breath and fanged flair of lightning,
Tamed once in the cloudy cage of Pentelic marble of the Parthenon.

But the world piled dust before her, baiting with its groveled roads,
For her black mullings, much-tasted rain, and heaven’s leaves to fall.
If only the Michelango-to-come had carved the clouds of her
For the light to remain, shining its centuries,
Then maybe the thunder would have been left undone.

A pig in the grass
Sounds at scratching and bratching,
Scratching and bratching are sounds
Of the world at its last.