Transmogrified from handsome, fit, and trim,
to lesser forms of all these traits and worse,
I see an inescapable reverse
of progress, unremitting fall of him

who raised me, once robust and hale of limb.
Two hundred photos track decline as hearse
awaits — a slideshow tribute; folks disperse;
we family watch the coffin sink, then dim.

Not every portrait’s flattering to see.
I ponder on the inner man, as well,
as some of his decisions bore disdain.

Yet broken or intact: this, too, was he.
It takes a gallery, in full, to tell
the tale where love remains to wrestle pain.

Memorials abound along the edge
of highways, almost roadside – dare I say? –
attractions, with their flowered crosses, gay
in contrast to their meaning’s impact, ledge

between the living and the dead, a wedge
that sometimes drives the two apart. Each day,
my work commute transports me past a way
now withered, now, at times, revived, a dredge

of anonymity I’ve seen at least
these fifteen years, unnamed but surely dear
to those who knew their faces. With alarm,

I notice now a slender, stiffened beast,
a doe in fractured pirouette, dead near
the shrine, and marvel how she came to harm.

Do I atone too soon the glow that flares within?
No person knows, nor ever will. Am I but voiceless
brute, predestined still? Unending verbiage
tumbles from me, bears

the dirge of chirping (though too harsh for cares
of some) of crickets by the thousands, shrill, a
horde that fathoms heat, the flaming thrill that
itches dragon’s tongue with hateful airs.

Yet why does pain combust within my blood?
Whose hearing shall I call? Who yet remains?
Your ear, that part of you, now lives in me.

If “you” console me, I console this flood. One
wishes yet to speak — the past detains —
to understand how heart yet trembles free.