And are their embroiled remnants flying like tattered flags
past the backstage doors flapping like worn rags around
street light poles or skittering down blind alleys and then
ballooning over manhole covers, steam coming up blowsy
in the blackness from the subway and sewers and blanketed
by the city like stars in the bright light-polluted urban night?

No, they are finally and complete way above it all right there
and looking down instead of up for once and for real always
seeing us the way we saw them and confused, perhaps, again
by the verifications of another and another the lost mother
and the abandoning father and the missed sisters and, then
the wild brothers step, step, step and otherwise …. otherwise
otherwise, otherwise I’ll, I’ll, I’ll … And who has not keened
for them and where was the wake and who studied the cause
of death and was an autopsy an option and what the tombstone

And why the mass grave and how the cremation before the
family plot was found …. so how can we say gone when you
were always gone and have not left, perhaps, cannot leave, oh,
cannot leave but wrap yourselves, them selves, greater selves
band-aides on the poxes of city life that blow in the fabulous
harbor and settle on the high grounds and humps like the
early fall of leaves in the nest of our ancient circling Blue Hills.

 

James Van Looy has been a fixture in Boston’s poetry venues since the 1970s. He is a member of Cosmic Spelunker Theater and has run poetry workshops for Boston area homeless people at Pine Street Inn and St. Francis House since 1992. Van Looy leads the Labyrinth Creative Movement Workshop, which his Labyrinth titled poems are based on. His work appears weekly in Oddball Magazine.