That linkage of warnings sent a tremor through June 

as if to prepare October in the hardest apples. 

One week in late July we held hands 

through the bars of his hospital bed. Our sleep 

made a canopy over us and it seemed I heard 

its durable roaring in the companion sleep 

of what must have been our Bedouin god, and now 

when the poppy lets go I know it is to lay bare 

his thickly seeded black coach

at the pinnacle of dying.



My shaggy ponies heard the shallow snapping of silk 

but grazed on down the hillside, their prayer flags 

tearing at the void-what we

stared into, its cool flux

of blue and white. How just shaking at flies 

they sprinkled the air with the soft unconscious praise 

of bells braided into their manes. My life



simplified to "for him" and his thinned like an injection 

wearing off so the real gave way to

the more-than-real, each moment's carmine 

abundance, furl of reddest petals

lifted from the stalk and no hint of the black 

hussar's hat at the center. By then his breathing stopped 

so gradually I had to brush lips to know

an ending. Tasting then that plush of scarlet 

which is the last of warmth, kissless kiss

he would have given. Mine to extend a lover's right past its radius, 

to give and also most needfully, my gallant hussar, 

to bend and take.

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