by Taylor Mali

I don’t want to tell you what you already know
so I won’t tell you you’re going to die.
Even so there was a time
when such a revelation
would have felt a curse —
my mother told me not to cry,
that she, not I, would be the first
to die, which only made things worse.

And someone here will be the next to die.
This, too, must come as no surprise.
But this isn’t a poem about the death
of that person — the next in this room to die —
this is about something else instead: the very last
one of us here to join the dead.

He or she who outlives the rest.

When that day comes — and may it take its time! —
by then who will care or even know we all once met,
gathered to share stories, rhymes, wine, and bread?
The rest of us all dead, except you:
the last one to go.  When that day comes
who then will know?

I say we will.

We will be waiting for you in that other place
to do what we are doing now, face to face,
with whatever wine the dead have to drink,
what bread to eat.  We will greet you and say,

Welcome.  Come and eat.
And take, at last, your empty seat.

by Taylor Mali

Because men murder their wives every day;
because when a woman dies and it looks
like a tragic accident, a botched burglary
or even (in fact, especially) a suicide,
it too often turns out to have been her husband,
I wonder if, when the detective called
to tell me what had happened to Rebecca
(It seems your wife has taken her own life,
those were the words he used: seems
and taken her own life, not killed herself
or committed suicide instead, and nothing
more than seems even though she was dead);
I wonder if as I began to cry the tears I never cried
when first my father and then even my mother died;
I wonder if he was secretly taping my every word,
my breathing, the entire act of sorrow,
for playback at some future date
just to see if I sounded like an innocent man.

Because later, after the services,
after the shrine of flowers and candles disappeared
as suddenly as it had bloomed on the sidewalk;
after the medical examiner made her ruling
and I was allowed to break the tape that sealed
our apartment and walk in on her last night,
the scene of the crime, untouched except for the window
from which she had jumped, now closed,
but everything else — the small and final stones
of her ritual still lying in a cross on the floor,
goldfish floating dead in the fish tank;
even as I bagged and gave away her clothes,
invited friends to take what fit if they could
to remember; I wonder if I still — or ever —
was a suspect in her murder.
I think sometimes I should have been.

I don’t mean that I was there or opened the window for her;
gathered her screaming in my arms and let her go,
but rather by the small, sad cloud that hung
over her and which rained stinging, black,
and bitter tears on her–daughter–of–the–Holocaust head;
I knew that she would one day do this,
even — and I cannot stand myself for saying so —
even hoped she would in the same outrageous,
secret way you might hope a dog (like our dog,
the one she picked out herself
because he cowered in the back of his cage
as though he did not expect to be saved
from the shelter); in the very same way
you hope to god this dog will die
before you have to put him down.

by Taylor Mali

If you were the type of person who could,
without the slightest hesitation,
open your mouth and utter forth one beautiful sentence
with a syntax as easy to follow as a mile of twine
leading out of a complex maze,
then you might enjoy cultivating the idea
that eloquence is a quality that cannot be acquired,
that you are either born with the effortless ability
to produce fully formed thoughts as though crafted and delivered
to the tip of your tongue by God, or else you must resign yourself
to a life of little more than grunts;

but if like me you are one who labors over every word
and turn of phrase, who does not trust he can express
what he believes or even know what he believes
until first he has ground each word against each other
to see what crumbles and falls away
and what in the breaking may get even deadly sharper,
then you know that you do not betray the craft of writing
when sometimes you part the curtain to reveal the awkward gears,
the sputtering false starts and poorly chosen
ejaculations
that may first have burst forth
and threatened to hijack, disguise, or rip
the very guts out of your greatest truth,
of which in desperate need the world may be.

by Thomas R. Moore

Granite posts square a God’s acre, a tiny
plot of blueberries and asters beside a crushed–
stone drive to three new houses on the shore.

The black slate headstones vanished a few years
back, pretty pieces for a garden in New York
or maybe it was kids one night in a pick–up

drinking Bud Lite who tipped them out, then
regretted what they’d done and dropped the stones
into a gully.  Somebody knows.  The names

are erased except on a tax roll or a family tree —
hardscrabble farmers working thin soil over
ledge, the husband cutting shingles at a mill

or wrestling granite or shaping white oak
futtocks for a schooner in Castine.  The new
driveway skirts a rough–cut granite cellar

hole grown up in popple, the apple trees gone
wild, the only sounds a clunking hoe, the gulls,
the wind, a washboard’s splash and thrum.