in the wrong line

Thinking of absent friends as the moon turns full and the year turns to winter.

Death and the Moon

                        (for Catherine Marcangeli)

The moon is nearer than where death took you
at the end of the old year. Cold as cash
in the sky's dark pocket, its hard old face
is gold as a mask tonight. I break the ice
over the fish in my frozen pond, look up
as the ghosts of my wordless breath reach
for the stars. If I stood on the tip of my toes
and stretched, I could touch the edge of the moon.

I stooped at the lip of your open grave
to gather a fistful of earth, hard rain,
tough confetti, and tossed it down. It stuttered
like morse on the wood over your eyes, your tongue,
your soundless ears. Then as I slept my living sleep
the ground gulped you, swallowed you whole,
and though I was there when you died,
in the red cave of your widow's unbearable cry,

and measured the space between last words
and silence, I cannot say where you are. Unreachable
by prayer, even if poems are prayers. Unseeable
in the air, even if souls are stars. I turn
to the house, its windows tender with light, the moon,
surely, only as far again as the roof. The goldfish
are tongues in the water's mouth. The black night
is huge, mute, and you are further forever than that.


— Carol Ann Duffy
from Feminine Gospels

Ode to Those Who Block Tunnels and Bridges

teach us there can be movement
in stillness. in every broken syllable
of traffic a syllabus that says
while you are suffering we are all
going to be unwell—let us
instead distill business as usual
down to the speed of a tree eating
light. as usual, business is built
from freight trains and warships
even when ‘it’s just coffee.’
these bridges should only connect
the living, so when the living turn
again toward death worship
it’s time to still the delivery of plastics
and red meats to the galas of venture
capital. to reject our gods if they are
not the gods who teach us all that comes
from dirt returns to it holy—
the holiest word i know is no.
no more money for the endless
throat of money. no more
syllogisms that permission
endless suffering. no more.
and on the eighth day of a holiday
meant to represent a people
fighting occupation my teachers
who stretch a drop of oil into a week
of light take each other’s arms
across eight bridges of this settler colony
singing prayers older than any country
as the chevron burns in the distance.
o stilted vernacular of life—
o pedagogs of the godly pausing—
what mycelia spreads its speaking
limbs beneath the floors of our cities.
the only holy land i know
is where life is. in the story
i was taught alongside my first
language it takes god six days
to make the terrible world
and on seventh day he rested
and on the eighth we blocked traffic.


— Sam Sax
originally published in Poem-a-Day