When my sister discovered
in a raincoat pocket
the loved dog’s long
forgotten leash,

she mocked her tears,
though I will not.
Death is a god
damned thief.

The Irish poet
Patrick Kavanagh
once rhymed
weather with father—

just like my friend
Ortiz once called
Vick’s Vapor Rub
bi-ba-poru,

or like the smokers
whose term hashish,
over centuries,
became assassin.

It’s true:
some words
are elegy
to what they signify,

but others
summon the dead
exactly
as they spoke,

like grainy voices
on a gramophone
that plays
inside our throats.

There’s a man on the train
nobody sees,
all the way from Penn Station to Brooklyn,

who watches me not-watch,
like an actor pretending,
as he rakes his bald scalp with a comb,

each angry flick
so precisely the same
little flecks of blood pepper his wrist

when the eighth time, every time,
he pockets the comb
and bends down to inspect his toenails—

a gesture so private,
so plainly familiar,
that just for an instant he’s real:

his towering church
baritone tolling, Y’all don’t
understand yet, but you will.