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.
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