I want to tell you how I walked tonight on the luminous street beneath your window. I want to tell you how the whiskering leaves arranged and rearranged themselves at my feet, and how the moonlight spilled its gold-white perfume over me. Despite the hour I want to run inside to wake you to tell you how the stars are sobbing. I want you to know how their borrowing has changed the earth, but it seems I am the only one awake outside our sad-eyed house. I want to pull you from your bed but your room is filled with simplicity of song, and you no longer sleep beneath these stars. I want to hear you full-throttle in that gentle Bob Dylan tune that gnaws at the light: and the silent night will shatter from the sounds inside my mind we’re both just one, two many mornings and a thousand miles behind but your bed is empty and I am awake, unable to tell you how I walked tonight.

Adagio like lightning opens the sky sometimes. It has found its secret place under my tongue. It has rendered the clocks speechless at high noon. It embraces me like early morning fog that is caught in the valleys at my lips yet curves over the inclination of the pines. I am kneeling inside myself but not at your gravesite, nor in church, but at the cusp of a poem. There, gleaming inside, pungent and sweet as a pomegranate seed, is the fierce shape of your memory, even when I think I may have forgotten your voice.

It took me a long time to climb/the stairs/ of the attic/ each step /over and over/stretched/ into a black landscape/a long staircase/ In my dream / I am at the top /searching /searching/for a dress/folding cloth/ over cloth /on empty wire skeletons/scraping past me/ until I find a black one/a long-sleeved knit /with a high neck /I know it must be for a funeral/ a funeral/a funeral/ for my son/ But which one? Just before Christmas, we travel to La Guardia to pick up Nick, my son who is returning home from a semester in London. I'm not thinking about the dream, perhaps I am watching the landscape unfold past the car window, or tuning out the static on the radio's classical music station, but that is before my heart explodes in the air and crashes to the ground in Lockerbie. The clock stops/ I lose the flaming crash time/ the silent hands time/ the black dreamless sleep time/the broken body time/the closed casket time/ What is it to have a memory folded over and over like black velvet, a cadence from which you can never retrieve his aroma, his lilting voice or the sight of his back as he runs out the door, but only remember searching/ searching/ Where is my black dress?

Some caskets were picked up by relatives in areas of airports normally reserved for livestock, those bodies difficult to identify, in sealed caskets Pan Am 103 bombed over Lockerbie, Scotland. I stand tall and stare at the wood grain. Rub the dark veins that once carried the light of the living tree and what if i spoke about despair? the way it grabs us. The rush of it through the canyon carving its own path. The fine echo of our songs, that ring and ring back, back and ring back the canyon giving up its silence. Loud in the now dark and who hasn't stood in the dark holding nothing but dark and handfuls of dark air. Fingers tight, hold on to a vein of light and the way the December moon can seduce you to the window where you will stare at her pale light so faint that the photo of your son is outlined by the faint light that is only an echo, that cannot be sounded back or back. Cannot be seen in the dark I cannot hear the sound of his voice. No, not even as an echo, no echo. Though the canyon of dark still flows over me the lid sealed tight I can no longer enter. In those moments with no faint light that I can't deny the loss, the dark grain of wood one more sight. The need for a finger, his hand a lock of hair or a glimpse of that fine grain of his arm, that damned fine grain.

Furioso An exhibit of photographer Taryn Simon’s recreated floral centerpieces was displayed to underscore how the stagecraft of political and economic power is created, performed, marketed, and maintained. - NY Times So this is what it has come to art that abstracts us not Goya's wild eyed Saturn devouring his child not even a fake spray of roses but a pretty little photograph of lisianthus a secret within a secret within a secret. French and British intelligence suspected Libyan involvement, American investigators found supporting evidence while combing through the Lockerbie wreckage Abdelbaset al-Megrahi's conviction vindicated Gaddafi's accusers. With the sanctions taking their toll and affecting Libya's lucrative trading relations with Europe, Gaddafi announced, per The New York Times, that Libya would take responsibility for the bombing and pay three billion to families of the victims. NY Times. We gawk at the captions: settlement agreement between Libya and the United States compensation for victims of Pan Am 103. Here artifice of political power plucked marketed stage crafted Money, isn’t it always about money?) barbed, gaudy signatures on paper treaties for trade steel splinters gun barrels bombs closed borders brass plaques Oil companies such as Shell and British Petroleum Opposed the sanctions, hoping to obtain contracts to survey Libya's oil and gas fields once they were gone. Facing a surge of undocumented economic migrants passing through Libya,Italy lobbied American president George W Bush to restore full relations with Libya in return for Gaddafi's cooperation in curbing migration. Wall Street Journal Agreement settling all outstanding lawsuits to provide compensation for damages claimed by their respective nationals Around 148 passengers and the pilot may have survived the initial explosion only to experience the horror of a 31,000 drop to the ground. Many of them would have passed out initially from lack of oxygen but regained consciousness somewhere between 15,000 and 10,000 feet. For them the seemingly never ending drop must have been horrific. Many were found holding crucifixes suggesting that they expected to die Associated Press Our dawn wakes with bitter hunger the wafer tastes of arid deliverance and wine of spilled blood. I would give my voice, the whole damned thing for the return of a son. It’s not exactly a prayer, but something close. The world still exists in us, we ask for more than paper-dry roses and lisianthus.

in your room, where I want to rest, I lean against the sill find my hands and am able again to see you clear eyed and smiling, that last day before you boarded the plane. I wish I could have known what the browning leaves foretold, and held back the approaching winter, but I had to watch you fly away. I waited for your pause on the stair, your farewell glance, which never came.

A gift from the people of Scotland, the cairn in Arlington Cemetery is made of 270 blocks of red sandstone quarried from Lockerbie in memory of the 270 people lost in the Pan Am 103 bombing in 1988 NY Times. grief is not buried here. only stones stacked. stacked in a cairn. stones carved fit end to end. Scottish stones. each stone like the other. laid round over round. end on end. bombed despair. stones laid back-to- back. each a wound. each like the other. identical stones. souls stacked to fit. wind to wind. flower to flower. each world tips over. back. back and back again. carved stones fit end to end. fragments of a bomb. fragments of sand. fragments split from lost gold of grass. from lost depth of spring moss, from loss. fragments of dreams. mortar forgetting air. love mortared in tears. in soaring seeds. mortared fragments balanced end on end. mortared endless dirges of stones. dirges of memory balanced at edge of sky. each stone. a life ended. my son. student. mother. child. father. son. daughter. pilot. stewardess. teacher. saint. angel. human. families around the dinner table. bombed. shiny. bloody. laughing. longing. broken. edges mortared. moments raining over the singing insistence of grief. moments peeling away clouds. back fitting to back. bone to bone. wing to wing. heart to heart. stones piled like bones. bombed. broken, burst fragments of stars. fall. tip back over back. gather in cairns. gather in grasses. gather in stones. fall from light into light. death into death. body over body over body. earthen piles. graves into grave into grave. wings over wings. in rounds back-to-back. stacked. each a clay pot broken. crushed. bombed. back to red earth. formed into memory. into tears. into open wounds. sealed by love's mortar. endless bones. end to end to end to end to end to end.  

This is not the spot where the plane plumaged from the sky to a hole in the ground. Nor did I ever hear bagpipes in the Scottish village, notes never hung on the limbs like knots of hard walnuts. Never did birds echo how sweet the sound. Never was it possible that there were gray skies, gray ghosts threading the fields, never scattered wreckage, nor body bags. This never was a town with ruins for houses, a pattern of death never traced on the Constable's wall, never a not of numbers, a shred of passengers identified by how unrecognizable they were. There never was a knot of bodies flying through the afternoon sky, never a soft plot to bury them in. There were never families, kneeling, keening. A son never boarded a plane nor looked back. A sky never emptied, a closed casket never filled, never was there a hole in the ground, and never did I love Amazing Grace.

Sostenuto You sit stunned thinking of the past The past that was only moments ago Before they said the plane crashed Before they said he was on it Before they said he boarded Before he boarded Before the bomb Before the fire Now passed Now past Loss Now past Now passed Before the fire Before the bomb Before he boarded Before they said he boarded Before they said he was on it Before they said the plane crashed The past that was only moments ago You sit stunned thinking of the passed

Adagio and still the mist condenses to drip down the window as if by some collective will. The day fringed with down, not yet eroding into the sharp-edged babble that carves me from this quiet center where you dwell. Here, spirit speaks in a language I cannot decipher: soft as your damp cheek brushing mine, its soft beard just emerging. On my lap your book lies open, silent hands turn the pages. In the margin, I find a message from you, August 3, 1988: Today while the blossoms still cling to the vine I'll eat your strawberries, 1I'll drink your sweet wine... Tomorrow a million will all pass away ere I forget all the joy that is mine today.