Poem

Living friends live
in the past so they bore us.
Running down that old nomenclature
of lovers, who and what

we did. The dead
cannot be told anything so we revere them.
That past is static. That is a photo.

Friends, the voices
just about through that old tale a thousandth
time, a thousandth subtlety, we listen
somewhere in Ohio (mist and corn

But mine-even the dead
sit up flaking in their graves–mine

is the heart
that fell apart
at the junction unremembered