Fresco, and: Burial, and: Three Attempts to Understand Suffering, and: South of Jacksonville

Fresco

To lose my father I walked the road.

After a hot night of no wind. One planet fading.

Withered orchard, cloudy light. A sprinkler, chugging and returning. Up to the right, on a monastery wall, the face of a frescoed saint, all but a jawline chipped away. Initials scratched into his faint bloodied gown. A fissure across his book.

Burial

Scattering the relics from my satchel,

I wandered scrubby hills.

A jay’s song echoed through boulders.

I placed his tongue,

white like wedding cake, on a dry turkey-oak leaf. To touch and be touched,

we’ve both entered rooms. As his balls slapped

against someone, he prayed.

Just outside a tortoise burrow— that’s where I left his dick.

Wrinkled clown.

Rolled opiate. Fallen toy pillar blazing

in the night at the end

of the century. At the edge of those palmettos,

where I held a shovel.

Three Attempts to Understand Suffering

1

A birdcall and a breath in the roofless chapel: that pleasure was brief.

Unlike one full rotation of this galaxy. Or sycamores peeling along the river,

guilt fanning out through my body, is enlightenment accidental?

Like pear slice, dry mouth.

2

This life—this one— is a fleck of yolk on a cooling skillet?

After so much, I can rest?

3

The ground under me damp with early snowmelt, my craving diminishes,

diminishes, grows—die back, return, die back,

die back—it surges in my mind

toward a body other than his: robins feeding; orange

breeds orange against brown world. Snow only

at the north foot of

each tree. I’m dappled inside with sunlight.

And then I’m not.

South of Jacksonville

Four shrimp boats on the horizon. Receding squall, clear winter sea. Walking the tide line,

I hear his voice again,

pained, full of resolve.

The lagoon where blue starfish flicker,

curl—I’ll follow him there.