Bloomsday in the Bogs

Year 23. 

Bloomsday In The Bogs

I search for your name in the clouds when all this time 

I should have returned to the bogs. To the cranberry bog 

where they rope the ripe berries into a red, pond-wide heart.

To the summer bog on Nantucket where I could have spread

your ashes in the Atlantic, on the North Shore: Quidnet Beach.

I could search for a bog here

 –the aiguamolls–

where I could later join you.

Around the bog thick poplars whisper and shake: a leafy hug.

Over the bog rises a silver mist: heat carrying away winter’s tears.

On the bog dragonflies hover and dip: listening.

In the bog science proceeds: time rethinks morning, math, eternity.

Under the bog the world wonders how it will all end.

Beyond the bog you wait for me: since the beginning.

Bloomsday Again

 21st Bloomsday

                for Pep

Today your death is

twenty-one years old.

An adult.

Today your death could

walk into a bar in Boston

and order a Sam Adams.

Today your death could

play blackjack at Encore

(which is only five, btw).

Today your death could

rent a car, adopt a child,

be a driver's ed instructor.

Today your death is

a college junior majoring

in grief management.

Today your death is

so big it would need

numeraled candles on its cake.

Today your death will

have just fifteen more

years to live.

Always Doesn’t Seem Like Such a Long Time, After All

His beard, grown as camouflage for a dove,

curves around the smile that widened just for me.

Gentle fingers squeeze hard between my ribs

for the photo, pull me in tight, make me gasp.

Taken, poof, in a rainbow-bursting flash of sunlight.