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Afterwords Your latest postcard's glossy lupines spike In high-pitched hues: "powder puffs," you'd describe them If, between acts, we sipped red house wine By a glass wall, smoke blurring in stained plumes, "For dens of vain wildlife." I'd grin, surprised, As always, to recall your size-12 tracks First loped Ohio fields. Sly, you'd revise: "For female masochists, or do you think That's a tautology?" O arias Of laughter. O arias and arteries And let's howl at the present tense. At this Last card, a bad joke best cracked sotto voce By some gout-ridden, nameless demotee Whose age-diminuendoed range has chewed At his career. Are career and caries Unfriendly cousins to "decay," black snood Of the same hue as Death's stained robe? And care? And what of carnivore, that scene-chewer Who prowls through flora glossy as this card's, Mailed the day you died? Both of us were suckers For etymology, still-hungry orphans Like those two straining for the wolf's stone tits, Mouths open and now art. O origins And terminals, after Terminus, The god of borders: those between close friends Who mute a howling loneliness with cards; Those, too, between the tame and wild. Dusk-stained, My kitchen's perfumed with small reddish shards Of Puppy Chow, and now the gluey smell Of tear-blurred mail. "The hour of the wolf," Said forebears after learning to encircle Their villages with walls: the dusk-lit gulf Where housepet and killer become the same-- O arteries o howl o terminus-- As flowers and teeth, or flesh and its shade.  in memoriam William Matthews |