(and sometimes we grieve the inanimate)

State Park Road, Wisconsin

faithful backbone

etched with storied pot-holes and grit,

you are the pocked face of a midwestern parade queen

waving and reaching your quiet song,

proud and natural and knowing.

summon your horizontal kingdom

and we bow in awe.

 

at the climax of summer’s romance, 

you are unbuttoned and sweating, 

your poise an upward reception 

of bicycle tires and slow fertilizing feet.

you yawn and sway like a hammock as

crickets and manure hypnotize themselves 

into feeling beautiful.

 

and you reach on.

leaves turn orange,

men follow.

orange cap and overalls 

hot orange tang in an orange mug 

crisscross ribbons across your spine

and mock the slain flesh that emerges,

still wild-eyed from dog day’s deception.

glittered frost and your stained rosy cheeks

hush the horror and leave summer ashamed 

and naked in her naivete.

 

and you reach on,

frozen puddles bow to frozen sky 

bows to frozen breath.

even the sparkle of deceit 

now fades under a gown of black,

so black it’s white.  so white, decades of roadkill 

at last feel tucked in for the night

and wonder if their souls have been saved.

slow feet are now no feet,

slow cars are now ditched cars.

your vertebrae is calloused

and unforgiving

as pulseless life forgets the impulse to live.

 

and you reach on,

bones creak and new expressive fractures

threaten your beauty queen poise.

but you laugh 

as light and shadow only make you more regal 

and the hum of 

a million winged harbingers

swarm to anoint you with the green 

stench of another cycle.

and you receive them.

their dark water chant hovers over your breast.

and you love them,

their imbecile promise of rebirth despite time’s ultimatum.

pocked and mud-puddled and devoted

you call to the horizon

unfurl the mess and insanity of your eternal wingspan

 and reach on. 

death comes as a pushy and inappropriate guest

but as life hovers around the dimming light of this season

why not

take death by her hand

pour her a stiff drink

toast her awkward ways

and then show her to the door

Sleeping within miles of where dad’s soul slipped away on HWY 43

Makes me wonder

Just how does a spirit exit it’s fleshy home?

Does it exit stubbornly

Clawing with silvery tendrils to ribcage and bone

Or is it squeezed out like toothpaste

From a phantom umbilicus?

Perhaps some rise effortlessly like the ethereal yeasty force of leavened bread,

Opened and warmed as it meets it’s new infinite ceiling.

Or maybe it’s more appropriately clumsy

As on the other end of the lifeline

When gravity plays drunken puppeteer on fragile new limbs.

Frayed and jagged threads of soul catching on knee cap, 

Or tangled in ceiling fans and riding out eternity 

On a dizzy blade.

And if one should be so nimble that it escapes fascia and grey matter,

Grey paint and plaster

Could it still find itself, like I do during flying dreams,

Thrashed and bound by the gnarled limbs of trees?

Or is it quieter than all this,

That flesh tied to spirit knows no separation,

And eternity lives out it’s exhale with cell and soul embraced?

Or is it simply

That the settling of bones 

After car has crushed

Heart has ceased

Breath escaped,

Is just so full of it’s own emptiness

That we mistake this new vacancy 

And it’s foreign void

For a soul.

And we name it animate it call for it

So our own void has a place to go.

and so it is.
the perfection of little june’s reply ‘his name’ when asked what she’ll
miss most about her deceased guinea pig Cookie.
and isn’t it true,
that sometimes the very thing that chews on our hearts the most
is not the literal passing on of a life
but more the abstract digestion of mortality itself.
the permanence. the ‘not-here-anymore-ness.’
and grandma, do not hear this as a dishonoring of your glorious pulse
that stopped three days ago.
i knew some of you.
your laughing smile
your jack-knife dives
the floating gardenias that perfumed your soft elbows
and the hearty way you threw love at your god.

yes, and the hearty way you threw love at your god.
your wide open hymn was heard for more than 90 years on this planet
and we felt it’s blaze.
you prayed hard that we would sing along
and in your eyes, some of us didn’t.
but maybe now you understand
that as we marched those heavy volumes away from stained glass and holy pew,
into forests and campfires
to metamorphose with the kindling who birthed them,
that our song was the same.

crackling together and becoming ash.
hurled
into the symphony of black
that continuously
recklessly
and magnificently mirrors
magnifies
and ricochets
our love back.

so yes grandma, i will miss more than your name.
(but then again, you weren’t named Cookie.)

a Tom Holmes exhibition “Silly Rabbit: A Gravestone and an Urn”

a canary yellow cinder block headstone? 

an upside-down box of Trix cereal for your dad’s cremated remains? 

what if we all were a bit more personal with the altars of the deceased?  

graveyards becoming candy lands,

ashes adorning vessels as colorful as if

the body that once stood 6’ 6”

were now dressed and ready for

the greatest party of all.

burial

he buried her bones and surrendered flesh, opening

his own to the dirt’s unrelenting need for decay.

under an awakening cycle of light,

we burn away the burden

and inhale just a bit more.

horror

and love

and the absence of both

braiding death’s silky locks

into one

infinite moment.

1943-1993.  david warner lives an extraordinary life, an astronaut exploring new territories of the heart, through his profession as heart surgeon, his unconventional loving as a husband, his unconditional adoration as a father.

4.3.1993.  david warner waved at the rising sun on hwy 43 through his sunroof just before he crossed the center line and exited this world. 

i found this mix tape today (coincidentally) that my brother made for me in 1993.  he was coming from colorado to meet my dad, my mom and myself in mexico for spring break.  little did he know while making that tape back in his dorm room at CU that he’d have to give it to me in a pile of tears, as we met in the airport in cancun.  i remember in some kind of frozen hazy shock to my system while we flew the same route in reverse that we’d flown earlier that day, that this mix tape simultaneously comforted and haunted me. titled, Time Stood Still, i still find it eerily appropriate as it became my soundtrack to the beginning of the next chapter of my life, one without dad.  

so i lay a little altar in the backyard today to honor his life.  the mix tape, an old favorite pipe of his, and some tobacco bought 18 years ago in appleton, wisconsin. i hear signs of new life outside this early spring day, the robins and the finches doing dances on stretching, yawning branches.  leaves unfurling their green wings.  earth breathing upwards to meet them.  may all these sounds be my mixtape for dad today, a soundtrack to the undying force of life.

4.3.2011.  he’s still performing heart surgery on us all.

a home for dad’s ashes

Some celebrate father’s day by firing up the grill. Charring meat to
remind the Y chromosomes of the days of hunt and feast. Toasting the
earth’s favorable nod toward the sun with homebrew and moonshine.
Elevating man to a level that includes both muscle and heart.

Others scan the candy colored hallmark rows bearing candy coated
sentiments, selecting the card that says just enough, but not too
much. An annual gesture of ‘i haven’t forgotten about
you’ …subtext… ‘but how long ago was it that you forgot about me?’

So why is it that today, stuck somewhere between a memory of a father
who celebrated solctices, beer and beating hearts and a father who
forgot his past by forgetting which side of the road to drive on, I do
nothing at all. Well, maybe not nothing. I stick a pin in a plastic
Jesus doll head and turn it into a marshmallow roasting lightning rod.
And I watch the sky turn various shades of grey outside the kitchen
window. And I try to remember the sound of his smile. And I smile. And
I write this.

17 years ago today my dad stared down a Mac truck on his last breath. The car behind him said he waved at the rising sun just seconds before he swirved across the center line. The autopsy said he was intoxicated. His cardiac partners said he was overworked and tired from sewing up hearts all day and night. Nurses from that evening’s party said he impersonated a great Willie Nelson and lost track of time. A friend offering to drive him home said my dad proclaimed ‘i am my own man’ and took back his keys. Mom said that the county he died in, Fredonia, means ‘free the woman’ and it was his last gift to her. The Chief of Police said they would investigate a possible homicide because of the note from my mom they found in the car saying ‘I’M PISSED.’ The crows watching from powerlines above said a silvery soul slipped effortlessly from the wrecked car. The jaws of life said all 6 foot 6 of his flesh, though bloodied and torn, still poured with majesty. His steering wheel said that the chest cavity it crushed was a true, one-of-a-kind, radiant beauty. The heart that stopped beating 17 years ago said it’s massive capacity for love was only just beginning. His daughter said, ‘i know.’