18×24″, Bogus Recycled Rough Sketch (brown) paper, with a variety of colored charcoal and stick Prismacolor.

18×24″, Bogus Recycled Rough Sketch (brown) paper, with a variety of colored charcoal and stick Prismacolor.

18×24″, Bogus Recycled Rough Sketch (brown) paper, with a variety of colored charcoal and stick Prismacolor.

18×24″, Bogus Recycled Rough Sketch (brown) paper, with a variety of colored charcoal and stick Prismacolor.

These windows.
How many birds

Did we save.
Stunned bodies

Kicking to flight.
While others.

Remained hollow
Boned death.

Heads lolling
Their beaks
Aimless.

Sparrows taught
Us to recognize

Each other.
To want each other.

From life. Direction.
And to fear. Elsewheres.

Expectations. All Death
Asks for flight. Asks for

Windows burnished
Become reflection.

To spiral. To dive.
To attempt. Into.

18×24″, Bogus Recycled Rough Sketch (brown) paper, with a variety of colored charcoal and stick Prismacolor.

18×24″, Bogus Recycled Rough Sketch (brown) paper, with a variety of colored charcoal and stick Prismacolor.

18×24″, Bogus Recycled Rough Sketch (brown) paper, with a variety of colored charcoal and stick Prismacolor.

If you wanted to start, you could say, in between. If you wanted to be boring, you could say, pause. If you wanted to be accurate, you could write, unfinished. If you were listening for his breath, his breath in whistles past you, touched by whatever breeze that happens to be passing. The spring air cutting with orange blossoms. The winter air hugging in whispers. The fall air taking your loves. And the summer. The summer waits. As you waited watching his hands above the piano keyboard. The way his crumpled lumpy octave spanning fingers rested on the keys sounding notes that were ghosts. He had mastered the imitation of the piano. Hunched over, his hands unmoving, he echoed the last notes he had played. Perfect. When he stopped playing, you were never certain what was piano. What was him. What was your memory of him. Your gaze tracing each finger, knowing that one of them would coax out another ringing tone. And, too, he had the resonate frequency of the sounding board memorized. From anywhere in the house, he would hum, and the piano would answer, an echo, a memory, a future, a promise. If you wanted to be true, you could write train. The middle. The train that goes by your window and continues to go by your window. The rattle of the tracks and wheels eclipsing your head bursting the very air into sunders wherein he echoes and you catch yourself catching yourself amid the rumbles of the tracks like the year you were on the ice and put your body full upon the sheet of solid water to hear the groans beneath your weight. The cracks more felt than heard. The chimes of the ice strings of the grand piano your father rested his fingers on the deepest and plucked. And you lied to him wanting to hear what he heard. To tie yourself to him by sound as you want to tie yourself to his last breath which has been coaxing past your face trailing across your lips and then dissipating so that you turn each direction your hands out your jacket open your shirt tails out not asking for quiet but instead searching each sound seeking to follow all back to the source and there continue. There put him in motion.