When I saw Frank last winter he seemed fine, though the cancer had been brewing in him for a long time. We thought it had left his body. I spoke to him last week. He really loved the morphine. He told me that he might with luck have a couple of years left. I think he said that to make me feel better--he didn't need his friends to mourn while he was there to hear it.
Here are three untitled poems from Frank's 2009 chapbook "zig-zag journeys."
Almost out of the sky, half of the moon
Makes a cross of mourning between my eyes
Oh to follow the road that leads away from everything
Your breast is enough for my heart
I have said that you sang in the wind
You gather things to you like an old road
I have gone marking the atlas of your body
Stories to tell you on the shore of evening
I who live in a harbor between the lips and the voice
A full moon in the birdbath, a perfect circle of
ice blunting sparrow beaks. Cold stings the
first knuckle of each finger breaking pieces of
bread from a slice now half its original size. I
laugh out loud at the morning headlines, "St.
Francis of Tucson, Bread Man to the birds,
found wanting for nothing ever again, a freeze
in a cactus garden of the Tucson Basin."
what wind blows the Mexican Palo Verde
the cactus wren
my footsteps confess
no special talent
one sneaker follows the other
into a brilliant make believe I know I know
Mother Father Sun and Moon
Hi O Silver and away
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