In the gym they’re hanging
the work of my brother’s childhood friend,
overdosed this winter.
Out on the harbor’s sumac islands, bodies
dead from smallpox rise
out of the sand: sea wind, combers.
Persian astronomers believed
all this will be absorbed back
into The Boundless,
from which every world rises.
An observatory once stood where these April
apples now fill with the sound of wings.
And I’m alone with her
mâchéd portraits, the tulips & dark
gravity of what we can’t see.
Listening, but hearing only myself.