NYC Man Killed While Skydiving May Have Lost His Parachute

—for Bill McCartin

If I said sparrow in flight falling, would you look up or look down? If I said the sun comes with a fierce anger this month, would you gaze at it directly? Or would you be one of the many to cover your eyes. Would you wear blinders but call them blinkers? Would you draw down the window drapes about your body? Would you wear these furnished cerements as a second skin? Would it matter if I said I knew him. Knew him knew him, before the fall. Would it matter if I said there are stone shapes rising from the earth like deadman anchors expelled for no good reason? Felled trees? Rising tides? Another hurricane to name and to abide by? If I made it a point to harangue you and everyone you know, would you think to harvest the words stump or cold or cemetery? If I said the word stump aloud many times would you fault me my pain? If I sneezed would you turn away and offer a blind eye? Or would you say Gesundheit or even God bless you? Would you be one of those fools to think that thing about sneezes that some fools think? How in that second of time the heart stops? Would you be one of those people always worried about the heart stopping for good? Would you hear me in my second of anguish and wonder if I was just a second away from falling, too? If you heard the sound his body made when it landed, what would you say about the man fallen from the sky without wings? What would you say to the parachute fallen once it was found? What would you voice to the field or the forest that captured their fall? What of the air itself? The clouds? The sun? Gesundheit? God bless you? And what of the birds watching, who did nothing? If I said that I blamed them most of all, would it matter? If I told you how well I knew them, the guilty, by name, would that make any difference? Grackle and robin. Woodcock and bunting. Waxwing, thrasher. Red-winged blackbird. Red-throated loon. Red-necked grebe. Hawks red-tailed or red-shouldered. Varied thrush, gilded flicker. Mourning warbler and worm-eating warbler. American redstart. The clay-colored, the field, the pine, the vesper, the white-throated and white-crowned, the black-eyed. The brown-headed and the rusty. The evening something and the orchard. The house this or the house that. Empty words always falling off this tongue and alighting for a time in the branches or lower still, on the surface of the earth the way birds always do, whether living or dead, at the end of all things: little more than this clump of plucked feathers and little more than empty clutch of air. A soft breeze. Ash—

—whisper of ash
trying to carry forth

something of his name.

Winter’s Canvas

Think of these lines as brush
work made by the painter’s hands.

Think bristles as they kiss the cream
white of canvas. Think wet snow

& trees empty of leaves. The lines
of lungs lifted up into the coldest air.

Think musculature: one dark trunk
after another, rising each day

into the steady hold of winter.
Clumped flakes the size of nickels.

Think burial mounds & angels
anchored to the earth for seconds

at a time. Think salt, think scruff. Skiffs gone
to puddle in places. Mirrors frozen over the very

next frozen moment. Think frozen birds too
if you must. The vital flash of red a flash

of a cardinal’s winter coat. But not before
the scrape of the palate knife & parallels passing

hands those neat lines for tires wheeling
off. Cars drawn & swept along, into each end

less expanses of time. This drudgery of silence
deep & white. All the living & the dead folded

into one canvas after another. Paint thick
for the eyes of god & the eyes of snowbirds in flight

to witness, frozen or forgotten, in devotion to be
hold each small man’s small place by

the hearth. A quiver of fear for what is
so lovely. This need of fire for shelter

if the cold loneliness of winter is to be
survived. If ignorance pulls us dark

& deep into hatred. If hatred a wave. If stupidity.
If a blank rage of whiteness hits hard & swells

then the fires must burn clear through
this canvas to all others. If living is

something we intend to hold to
like the handle of a brush. Like the scars

covered over from this winter to those
that follow. From the belly of these soft

bristles. From the sharp stab of each toe.
If thinking & warmth are to bring us peace

we must listen.
Now listen—

Can you hear the whispers of snow calling?
Can you hear the mice & squirrels smothered

their chirping complaints? Can you hear
the noisy work of the pots we have set to boil?

Can you hear the lone painter’s long-dead arm
simmering? The poets’ teeth seething in the stew?

The prayers of the pious among us. All those bones
like everything & nothing at all, warped in water.

Come together to churn up little more than color
less blood & broth. They leave us hungering

for more. They make it so clearly known: how there
is never barely enough to go ‘round these parts.

Morning Song

It’s cold today so the sun’s a lie. With this argument
a song & a reason for singing. Imagine in tune there—

There a man leaning & there
hands as cold as white horses

There a woman crying & there
hands as empty as any coffin’s door

There a child sleeping & there
a hand colder to the touch, wild shores

& lilies sprouting from the skin. There
the churned over loam as flesh.

But there is no man there & there is no woman
There is no child & there is no hand. No tune, no

melody nor lilies but the flowering of
bloodroot with white petals wrong enough

to smell of absence. Fingers long & out
spread & desperate. A short scented

whisper of time no song at all. Not even
utterance. Any such assemblage heard

a mirage of letters. Just another echo echoing
back news of the sun’s eager lies. Lies, lies, lies.

Pyramide de crânes (Oil on Canvas, Paul Cezanne, 1901)

It never fails, there are always dead leaves to lament

always the wind shouldering so much dread for a future

in which there is no future, always the sounds to remind us

that wheeze & whisper as history, that little cough of bone grown

to an ocean-sized gullet of absence. Still, how beautiful the skull

how full of artistry the shape of such dead tureens, a stack of stone

casings that call to mind the ancient masonry of the most holy

of trilogies: a mother & father with child, all three breathless

& rockpale when painted in ochre tones against such dark backgrounds.

Backgrounds hewn so close to the viewers’ eyes, close enough to still

hear the brushstrokes, each shift of the arm like the drawing of a bow

each a note spent across strings, the coming season’s lone violin, the lost

pulse of autumn overshadowed by summer’s longest stretch, that heavy

heat the abandonment of the finger’s pizzicato, a breath downcast & for now

forgotten. Dirt where the first great war dug itself in, a great gasp of flesh,

trenched losses of life sounded off by the words of a poet whose sad land

scapes must now include the fields between each jaw & collarbone. Absent

ridges where no instruments can be placed, nor played, no music heard.

We have worn these poems & paintings as robes, & as skin, & seen our

selves as cerements sewn, all cloth bound for the same wellwater abyss

each eye socket a stranded hour, each nose hole a cavern left empty of air

days falling endless into night’s abandon, leaves curling in on themselves

as expected. Brown husks of tree-shed time & unheard sobs of twine tied

about these stripped branches. Each wound of heart another spine set free.