This is called "Deaf Friend."
"Deaf Friend."
"What will be served for our reception in the devastation?
Finger food, of course, and white wine, something
printed on the napkins.
We were not children together, but we are now.
Every bird knows only a few notes constantly rearranged.
That is called forever.
So we wear pajamas through the practice funeral,
buckaroos to the end.
We make paper hats of headlines and float them away.
My home made of smoke, tiny spider made of punctuation.
My favorite poem is cinder crashed into the sidewalk.
My friend's becoming the simplest of men.
He sees a lesson in everything, from missing his train,
and his son hollering from the first branch, Dad,
guess where I am.
I was with him for my first magpies,
governmental and acting like hell.
And the new nickel, with Washington hard to recognize.
We've driven by a rabbit flattened
by an upset truck, jars of Miracle Whip broken
over the toll road in heavy snow.
We watched an old lady eat a hot dog
in a bun with a knife and fork.
A few emeralds winged off a fruit leaf.
What happens when your head splits open
and the birds fly out, its two notes deranged?
You got better.
I got better.
Wild flowers rims the crater.
Glitter, glitter, glitter.
We knew someone whose father died,
then we knew ourselves, astronomer, gladiator, thief,
a tombstone salesman.
All our vacations went to the sea that breathed two times
a day without a machine.
We got into trouble with a raft doing what we promised not to.
Further out, to be brought further back.
Here is my friend in his squashed hat,
trying to determine if a dot is a living thing and doing harm.
He's having trouble remembering street names.
But there's still plenty of Thoreau.
All that a human is made of is gold.
Very, very little gold."