High time I was writing and time to start asking
Where'd the summer go? And soon we'll all be saying
Where'd the year go? I'm sitting here in the
backyard and thinking of your voices his
and yours his growl and your chirp answering
each other He called up strength to
get his strong words out and you
sang yours as easily as a bird sings He
called you a self-sufficient little devil fo
saying yours all by heart while he had to flip
and fumble But there was patience in his
fierceness an audible love As the night wore
remember how his head fell into his beard and we
thought it was just his drink or weariness?
His doctor called it pickwickian syndrome after
Dicken's fat boy his lungs flooding with CO2
unbreathed trapped in fluid You laughed
too we both laughed when Claudine got up and
walked across the room with her red knitting
to fetch his next poem And he began inserting
into his mumble lines about a woman waving
something red in front of him as if to taunt
a bull That was spring those long nights and now
it's summer and he's gone and mornings start
to have an edge on them A hurricane's tail-end
whipped through here and left things wrecked
pink cosmos and flame-bright nasturtiums
looking posthumous Anyways Yvonne I wanted you
to have this his last book Nine Micmac Legends
knowing you'd hear his voice in them you
he loved that first night he saw you and heard
you speak a poem a nasty one at that