The role of elegy is
To put a death mask on tragedy,
A drape on the mirror.
To bow to the cultural

Debate over the anesthetization of sorrow,
Of loss, of the unbearable
Afterimage of the once material.
To look for an imagined

Consolidation of grief
So we can all be finished
Once and for all and genuinely shut up
The cabinet of genuine particulars.

Instead there's the endless refrain
One hears replayed repeatedly
Through the just ajar door:
Some terrible mistake has been made.

What is elegy but the attempt
To rebreathe life
Into what the gone one once was
Before he grew to enormity.

Come on stage and be yourself,
The elegist says to the dead. Show them
Now -- after the fact --
What you were meant to be:

The performer of a live song.
A shoe. Now bow.
What is left but this:
The compulsion to tell.

The transient distraction of ink on cloth
One scrubbed and scrubbed
But couldn't make less.
Not then, not soon.

Each day, a new caption on the cartoon
Ending that simply cannot be.
One hears repeatedly, the role of elegy is.

A personal lens: glass bending rays
That gave one that day's news
Saying each and every day,

"Just remember you are standing
On a planet that's evolving."
How beautiful, she thought, what distance does

For water, the view from above or afar.
In last night's dream, they were back again
At the beginning. She was a child

And he was a child.
A plane lit down and left her there.
Clod whitening the white sky whiter.

Then a scalpel cut her open for all the world
To be a sea.

There is this still, night-coming, beautiful horizon,
Birds gunning up and the dead grass
That means winter is still

Here and held in its dull intent.
Within minutes, the horizon is no longer
A flat gradation of gray

With a hint of silver mirror decay.
Instead, it's absence black.
And the moment is made up of car brights

And music sending a sound wave from inside
The mind. Nothing is stopping.
A year in tatters is interrupted by the thought

That the future is manacled
To the indefatigable now of February.
Still as the knife-girl strapped to the circle spinning,

Her hair splayed to one side.
Her eyes empty behind the blindfold.
The sense of silk. Her heart stopped.

Causes and consequences line up,
Ready for the next dawn
With its blight

Of glass bulbs.
In the welled nothingness of definitely,
There is another

Sad sobbing day. Someone has seen you
And says you were fine
Just hours before you weren't.

I say Come Back and you do
Not do what I want.
The train unrolls its track and sends its sound forward.

The siren unrolls its sound and sends itself
Forward. The first day of the last goes forward
As the last summer you'll see.

The dirge is all wrong for the season. Death remains
Wedded to mystery. How
Does the heart stop? On what

Moment's turning?
Which tick? And why? Only where
Is settled. Behind an address. Some block

Building. Some barricade brick
That hides bracketed hours
Until the doom door opens

And my I sees.
Police seal peeled back. Everything
As you left it. On and over and under.

Why are you not where you belong?
A black hat on a hook says nothing.
Ashes mirror ashes

In a mirroring window. And now how
Do we resolve this predicament?
The body becomes the art

Of identity. A face
In a photograph. The bas relief
Around the morgue door.

You, singularly you. And gone
Invisible.

The lights in the shades were lit,
Each bulb became
An empty symbol waiting
Like the fixed idea
Above a comic book Mickey. Outside,
Clouds connived to create obscure messages:
Here's a giraffe.

A male lion has a mane.
Imagination's ridiculous art.
She was clearly a member
Of the fiasco survivor's club
The living often belong to.
There a simple name meant, simply,
A name. No allegory. No

Discursive meaning.
Just experience. No interpretation
Possible, nor necessary.
Condense to seven stanzas
A particulate world. Draw a picture
Of flesh engineered
As parts of a whole. The pills

On the floor had rolled under the sofa.
The wheel begins its if only turning.
It had never stopped.
This is life's bargain that motion
Is hope. Morning fog,
Come back again. You will dream
Of this. Undoubtedly.