On the third month annivesary of your death

I sit feeding Mama our stray
black cat on the front stoop as usual,
4 a.m., still stunned from the alarm,
the garden so lush from all the rain
It’s almost scary -- so wildly
abundant. As I spoon out
food for her I pray to find the words
for a poem that
s like a dream just
under water, skittish and quick to flee.

Soft slur of crickets, Mama tearing
her food before me and a vacuous
receipt of fine mist swirling to and fro
in the yellow mid-distance
of the streetlamps up and down
Ninth Avenue, a quietly charging surf.

None of her four kittens lived
as long as she, but Mama seems
not to mind, to grieve, as she eats.
How could she? Love and appetite
are for the living and thus shadow
back the dead, the way the night
presses into Mama’s black fur,
dimming what’s been lost
further off the shore we can’t
anymore from our lights.

Last night I took the frying pan
my wife had cooked dinner in
and emptied it out back
where I usually do, on that blank
spot between the houses
just beyond the porch, listening
to hot grease spit onto dirt.

Something in the soft fracture
of that contacting sound
made me realize that
you weren’t alive right then
across the continent, taking a picture
or reaching out to help someone
or receiving a kiss, those motions
which were the measure by
which you consulted your God,
counting back the blessings.

Standing there pouring oil onto dust
I knew we would never share
our moments again.

I get it, Lord, he’s dead, added to
the rest of world’s lost sum;
what I don’t understand right now
is how in thinking of him right then
the late afternoon broke into psalm,
everything dripping from heavy rains,
the sky still turgid-grey, pent with more,
the grass so green and virile,
even the frying pan in my hand
heavier and hotter and more silver
because I knew he was gone.

Summer’s full soar and pour
is here, Lord, brother, in this
wet bowl of darkness
overbrimming with what
there is to lose and sing.

Our old cat Zooey get frailer
every day while she savages her
food and water bowl, keeping
so little from her appetite, her
eyes old, misty, yearning for more.
My wife sleeps in our bed upstairs
so burdened and gifted with
who she’s become; she’s every
woman I’ve ever desired to lay
next to and on and inside of,
listening to rain fall through her
all night as we sleep.

I love to write with his pen,
its heft and angle cross the page is
familiar and not, like the poem
I wanted to write today but
couldn’t quite get it.

Something tells me I need
to find him here, in the garden
so dreamy at this hour,
his height blent with the Mexican petunias
belling their purple muses from
stalks which tower up so stout now
just beyond the front stoop
where Mama’s wandered off for the day,
venting a perfume so faint
and strangely sweet I remember
at last what I meant to say
of you, brother, you who fades
now down the dawning garden path.

Now I can finish this poem
with a final flourish, waving
off all that mist in the mid-distance
which sours the view with death,
welcoming you here
in this deep dark strangely
fertile garden heart
we work and walk forever.