Each day’s obits read as if there’s a war on.

And all the while we were ourselves ideas,
not new ones, either, of if not a mind

Forked lightning sears and stabs and stabs again.
The thunderstorm threatening all afternoon,
lowering and dark, has now arrived.

Except it didn't. It went underground
as some diseases have been known to do,
returning with a vengeance in our time.

One Easter, the last chords of our closing hymn
still buzzing in the upright strings of the Hope Church School
piano, our black-robed pastor, fresh from his sermon,

Sunny May morning; going through the mail.
Among solicitations, one stands out
from summer neighbors: a Conquer-a-thon—

Wordless graffiti of unease
when people die where do they go?

The veil between the worlds is growing thin.
The grass is growing tall outside the door.
Who was that baby in the dream again?

I  Midpoint of summer. Horizontal light
   picks out the fly in the dusty web; mousedroppings
   fresh on my desk each morning; poems; letters;

Nowhere to go back to—they say—but there is somewhere to go.