Finality

for Don

The lights along the Minnesota River are
golden nails fastening shut the horizon.
The bus floats home, West across the plains,
over this dark thread of road,
past snow covered fields reflecting
the moon’s wet light, until we can no longer tell
what is land or water or sky and we cannot tell
which our brother rests in now.
As we cross the final bridge into Saint Paul
everything to the east darkens
and the whole country closes
around the heart of the Midwest,
around its churches and its silos, its pilgrims journeying
before death to kneel and kiss its winding fingers,
to kiss its noble silence spreading
between the Mississippi and the Rust Belt
like a woolen and moth-torn quilt, a fresh coat
of snow, a eulogy always, almost, spoken.

Death, though it is final, is also hesitant and unsure.
It is the persistent silence which follows
that convinces us this boy was the one,
this land too, these factories and these barges
sunning themselves in the grey light
as if they might dip beneath the water and re-emerge
glistening and alive; these docks and these cranes,
these warehouses angling into the shadows, preserved
in a death-like geometry, though tenuous, as if
,if we clap and summon the lord, if we stomp our
feet until we cannot smell what keeps the body
here, until the body shakes, then might these songs
wake him, might these factories turn and light
like a bulb screwed in, might we be sentence like-
not final, but running on forever
through the grammar of mourning,
the grammar of laughter when laughter is all that is left,
until all that is left is his skin, and his bones, and we
who buried him are only stories or ash
on our grandchildren’s mantels, and his name
spray painted on the Oak Park wall is painted over
or chips off and washes into the dirt, and his bones
too become earth, and the bullet
in his leg is all that remains, and rests,
a small black seed opening in his coffin.