for jw
Tom Petty,
desert highway,
summer heat.
This is a truckful of grief.
We spread your ashes
with the rattlesnakes
at Devil's Cairn, N.P.
For your last you swam
with the lost sisters
of the Pleiades,
a whisper in the trees
as you fell.
The rest of us,
the ones who'd
seen you last,
never heard you go,
only a knotty
thickening of dislocation
in the sudden silence between.
I imagine myself there,
that I held the fractured lengths
of you and strained
above my own heart's wild agita,
again and again and again,
again and again and again,
for the sound of your
breath.
Confluences.
Three forks.
Ragged buttes.
Montana.
Sagebrush.
Cedar bark.
Coyote scat.
Pelicans witness riverside
for motes and scales, dusts of you
they'll stow away in swift bills for transport.
A graceful coup,
this vertiginous spill,
this final transubstantiation:
Bright tiles unpacked against a blue sky;
volatile bodies cut through the black night.
Mourners write the new mythology.
I'm naming all the stars for you.
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