The Second of November

It was in the white of the year
That Father left the Multiverse
But death was a sweet hour
OF faith and dazzled face

For Time and God to converge
Or that Ethereal zone to confide
No longer to be confined on Earth
And little self and tea for beggars

With sons and friends to hold
One’s life, and to hold the ears
Of memory and all that was left unsaid
Unknown, private for paradise

The soul should know what the body doubted
The heart remains silent to fend off grief
The dying need but little, dear !
The inner room is where it is said

We forget our name for Good
The self is but a collection of choices
Some temporary disease of identity
How trivial the flesh, the spirit
Lives eternally, in wood and words
In a hush of prayer that blankets everything.

Musts, Shoulds and Could’vebeens

The solemn years have ended
In bliss of holidays extended
And parting with the world
Still unfair, with but a hope to dream

With tolling bell and taxes taken
It’s time for death, and nothing less
The centuries have not smiled like this
Since 1956, or else

Good news can be the common way
Our bones and teeth still have decayed
Time was not differ than what it is
You say that’s just life, I must have heard wrong

How heaven could be so sad?
And life so bottomless a well
Of mystery and anonymously clad
What’s on its way is going and gone

Time for eternity, never enough….
There are no “complete poems”
Only preferments and stations
That must dissolve, this purple state

Into a balance of modest clay and ash
The unblushing end is upon us here
So stay a while majesty and regret
That we might have loved, a little bit more

The sad world in her corrupt gown
With all the same stories and fallen angels like
The soldier, peasant, monk and squirrel:
We are just weary creatures here
Awareness of the end, is the beginning of the end.