Rereading

Rereading the poems of others and my own. Community across time and graves. What's left exceeds in significance one's last moment. Yet his last moment must have been exceedingly important for the poet. Nothing he did that day will seem meaningful. While we prosecute the war a pileated woodpecker and red squirrel compete for sunflower seeds. A winter slow to assert itself. I can still see my mother's father and his bowl of filberts, almonds, walnuts quiet weekday mornings. Both grandfathers read sports pages religiously. I don't know if my grandmother who gave me the anthology of, to date, dated unreadable poems read poetry. I remember my mother's mother spoke rarely as an animal. Writing but not knowing where I'm going unlike Joan Didion justly cannibalizing candidates who didn't read the Constitution, Bill of Rights or Federalist Papers. It's late, I have not vacuumed or shopped for food. Instead I reread Phil Levine's Salami.