Travel Guide For the Dead

Gray are the lives that matter, departed poems in a gray post-dated heaven; ‘silvery-gray,’ as the dead are said to say. Paris was built gray; in summer, the trees and the umbrellas upload color. Yet only a few poems surfaced they were too young to survive for long. Edinburgh is gray, gray are the plastic rainhats. Damp kilts gamely fly a little color beneath a waterlogged pewter. Words once penned had to be tied together so they would not sink. Shanghai flakes its red and gold, rises into cloud-scraping silver that gilts the gray Huangpu river. The girls are silk flowers in designer Nike’s. Gray are the wharfs and waterfronts. Young silvery laughter turns poems into porcelain teacups. It is good to write for the dead (the dying have their own poets). The deceased travel no more but reside in a living-space in God’s backlot, where all those who do not fit into extant poetry spin a grey alchemy into a colorful language which they then send to places no one ever writes about.