(In memory of Connor and Aunt Marlene)

To plan a family estate without child heirs
is to recognize mortality’s limits while still alive.
Consider how all artists know this when no one wants their art
since obscure in name while Solitude claimed fame sidetracked from effort,
the real work its own purpose just to create & creativity itself
living enough as a loving being only more solo by nature
with the overtaking need to make, make, make.

To give this away as free energy with vulnerability the only cost
is what feeds the spirit & extends the sustenance invisible in surplus
until the hidden acts are unsheathed as corn from their stalks.

Peel back the husks then as if laying alms down
like a chrysalis in metamorphosis if we can make our living spaces
alive as museum exhibits Wonder itself installs & lasts past
the disassembling too, as if all the heavens would accept eternally
the gifts in this process: all the journals & notebooks,
all the torn out poetry & prose, all the smashed flash drives,
all the photo albums emptied, all the labored creations tossed,
framed or unframed for the landfills of thrift,
the crypt-bins, the jettisoned, adrift flotsam
the earth is roomy with.

Does only the breeze speak for these vanished things
running concurrent with everything popping up
as so many blessings not yet counted
while so much else happens to take precedence
in this urgent climate: the stanzas of oceans,
the overtures of waves, this endless flowing surf of elements
slapping climactic tectonic shifts back to serenity stretching
one day apparently securely solidified?

What chorus of muses inhabits such cosmos at play?

They dissolve as dream hosts of edible writing on rice paper
fed to tropical fish in the deep which some Neptune reads,
ruminating on our vicissitudes of folly and heartbreak
bubbling blue green between coral & sea grass.

They land august as Fall leaves, the needles, acorns & cones debris,
that ground to be swept up, tossed upon canvas board
nature’s poster decoupaged organic in place.

How Time’s dimensions hold all of this at once
daily & sacred as what news may come
such as a young neighbor dying at home alone,
computer-slumped just up the street,
while a text comes of a grand Aunt at ninety
now entering hospice, & from this window is first snow,
quiet confectionary powdering the parallel house rows,
the winding blacktop with no soul in sight
though signs of such shine humming as lines between poles
birds & squirrels make use of above
as though turning calendars
page upon page.