For Grey Lambert, 1958-1991

I am emptying my chest onto the lawn
turning my house inside out. Antique lace,
silken camisoles, slips thin as skin
hung where they don’t belong.

I held his hand for hours, I could not see
how he could empty himself from his body.
How his skin could let him go.
I thought that trick, that turning
is how the dead know.

There’s smoke over the crematory.
A little wind fills with rain.
There was a man on the couch
with morphine counting his way down.

Air so wet it spatters, rain riven
gowns and negligees -- weather changes
silk, the feel, the hue.
How can a body let go like that?
Into hunger that sweeps up and pushes under.

I told him everything slow,
from the beginning,
as if the story would keep him. Words to burn.
White slips on the lawn, turning
myself inside out.

That was the autumn everything turned to love.
One adolescent buck broke with the skittish rituals of his kind
and stood in bald-faced daylight helping himself
to what was left of the tomatoes and basil.

The tall grass on Merry Christmas Prairie became so many bonfires.
The crabapples
had grown so full they could not sustain
their swinging and plopped
one by one
onto the flattened path where four deer and one fox
had passed that very morning.

Downtown, across the ravine,
stone towers
half hid among leaves'
which burst into waves of color.

If we could hear red,
it would resound like the bells of St. Mary's.

It's an act of desperation,
the rare mating ritual
of the bald eagle pair.

They come together mid-air between
mountains. You can barely make
them out. You with your Audubon

binoculars, you in your birding
hat. The two of them bound beak
and feather, claw and wing,

having taken leave of every other
instinct; like survival, like hunger,
when they caught that scent floating

in thin air. Mostly what they
have forgotten is how to breathe, how
to fly. They drop their wings,

admit to their full weight
washed clean of the serendipitous
magic of everyday bald eagle flight

by the thick true wash of lust --
which brings every creature right down
out of the wild kingdom into the one common, humble

denominator. Aren’t you glad,
bird watchers, you’re not a part
of that? Those eagles risk it all

for the free fall down the long swallow of sex,
speeding down the chimney of air
plummeting blindly toward earth, unaware

entranced, careening toward your keen eyes
riveted on the speeding bundle.
And just when you know this must

be a suicide pact; no bird heart promise,
but the real thing among a noble breed,
just before they hit the earth and scatter like burst pillows –

they disengage slow motion
in a stunning, artful gesture.
And there you are,

binoculars around your ankles,
as the eagles pick up the next breeze –
feathering, feathering and soar.