It’s fallacious to expect the dead

to be bathing in broad daylight

let alone a lifeguard to recline more

luxuriously than an archaic torso.

Today the cancer institute volunteers

ask me five questions concerning the future

of sun prevention, only to pay me

with stickers resembling a geometrically

inaccurate scarecrow. What do we mean

when we say make room for the dead?

Like the earth, what I want succumbs.

By the end of the calendar year,

the annual yield of nurses parachuting

into our dreams to salvage everyone

we’ve ever loved will be equal to the ragged

limbs of moonlight pulling out daffodils

the Spring failed to invent in time.

You weep. You rot. The relation

of the relation glimpsed only when

the brain stops. Naturally, you see god.

Naturally, a dog turns the grasses defective

and the story begins again. Over the river

is the soul and through the woods

is the body, to which we always go.

Who tosses these crumbs and who

will use them to pry open the hidden

casket of the horizon? This whole place is dark.

And only once have I walked towards

those distant angels if only to hear

lilacs shivering in the wind.