The Wake Of We
a going concern
For what little it’s worth now,
we might as well be a boatful of grasses
beached on a highway: not the first time
we’d have met each other in the wrong
vehicle at the right nominal event. Or
mistaken it for something else entirely.
Yet here we are, believing there's room
enough in what's left of land between us
and sky to contain the end we’ve always
been becoming. So we push on through
the last inch of night, through sand-reed
and rust to planks of dune parting us
from the sea. Wading into the bull pines
at dawn, the young ones got here early,
chose pine stalks fallen on the duff mat,
then hauled them back to the beachhead
to stack crosswise for our incineration.
Watching us waft in like dawn light,
they know it is right to give us something
to do: so we take our weightless fingers
into the sedge and scavenge kindling.
Hunched over heaps of switchgrass,
blazing star, wildest rye, we gladly
remember we’re dead, because we can
hear the drinking’s begun, hours before
it’s time to light the pyre. And what else
should we expect? It’s no secret that too
much whisky clings to its place in the
chain of inevitabilities. At junctions
of dread and hilarity, it’s only natural
to drown the hiss of our particles
evanescing into the shoals. And if a punch
or two is thrown, it’s done in the name
of something at best like love, or at
worst, kinship—because we’ve never not
known we’d end up here together, settled
by the hearth of our collective going
concern. We knew we’d find each other
again one last time, to mourn the genome
binding us to men convinced that
cosmic cinders molt from their thumb-tips
and women whose eyes are a trousseau
of forests no one else may enter. At this
distance from them, from everything
I thought I was, believed you were, there’s
nothing left but the nourishing confection
of emptiness unraveling before us. I am
glad to watch the world collapsing
within my useless heart. Birds alight
our hands. Tidal pools birth one-celled
cities by our feet. It is almost too beautiful,
almost too right. Even so, I cannot forget
the mongrel breath of Unguentine and
cigarettes at the Holiday Inn where
Francis threw himself free of it all from
a seventh storey rooftop back in ‘81—
but this time my visual grammar parses
that deadly flight as if he might’ve landed
after all whole as newborn eggshell,
Pall Mall in his mouth the closest we’d
come to a cremation that day. And here
he is now, tucking phantom twigs into
the suttee in his fastidious way, drawling
something like better to be late to my own
funeral, than not show up at all. Maybe
Francis and all our figment dead have
shown up here now not to drop elegiac
spittle into the fire, but to remind us
the last thing we’ll each remember, or
see, or regret is the least combustible
fuel beneath this burning. And all our
dead —each one flitting in with a token
sprig of sage, or grief, of delight, or
surrender—agree it’s time to kindle
the tree bones, time for the young ones
to help us mount the wood pile. And
all our dead are happy: in a few smoky
moments, no longer submerged in our
memories of them, they’ll sigh O,
freedom—idle as a boat full of grasses.
The young ones are unsurprised by
how little remains of us in the end. Yet,
handed a jar the size of a soda bread
from the day-old bakery shelf, they
weep to find we weigh much more
than they’d ever dared imagine—weight
the sums of yearning, heft the kilos of
undoing, hectograms of ecstasies, tonnage
of walk, sleep, talk, wait. At last, it is done.
They have carried us beyond the wake of we.
Our theoretical mass, reduced to ashes and
sand, dives back, grit by grit, into the fire
from where it came.
—The Rush / Mount St Mary’s Los Angeles, April 2026
Sections
The Wake Of We
a going concern
For what little it’s worth now,
we might as well be a boatful of grasses
beached on a highway: not the first time
we’d have met each other in the wrong
vehicle at the right nominal event. Or
mistaken it for something else entirely.
Yet here we are, believing there's room
enough in what's left of land between us
and sky to contain the end we’ve always
been becoming. So we push on through
the last inch of night, through sand-reed
and rust to planks of dune parting us
from the sea. Wading into the bull pines
at dawn, the young ones got here early,
chose pine stalks fallen on the duff mat,
then hauled them back to the beachhead
to stack crosswise for our incineration.
Watching us waft in like dawn light,
they know it is right to give us something
to do: so we take our weightless fingers
into the sedge and scavenge kindling.
Hunched over heaps of switchgrass,
blazing star, wildest rye, we gladly
remember we’re dead, because we can
hear the drinking’s begun, hours before
it’s time to light the pyre. And what else
should we expect? It’s no secret that too
much whisky clings to its place in the
chain of inevitabilities. At junctions
of dread and hilarity, it’s only natural
to drown the hiss of our particles
evanescing into the shoals. And if a punch
or two is thrown, it’s done in the name
of something at best like love, or at
worst, kinship—because we’ve never not
known we’d end up here together, settled
by the hearth of our collective going
concern. We knew we’d find each other
again one last time, to mourn the genome
binding us to men convinced that
cosmic cinders molt from their thumb-tips
and women whose eyes are a trousseau
of forests no one else may enter. At this
distance from them, from everything
I thought I was, believed you were, there’s
nothing left but the nourishing confection
of emptiness unraveling before us. I am
glad to watch the world collapsing
within my useless heart. Birds alight
our hands. Tidal pools birth one-celled
cities by our feet. It is almost too beautiful,
almost too right. Even so, I cannot forget
the mongrel breath of Unguentine and
cigarettes at the Holiday Inn where
Francis threw himself free of it all from
a seventh storey rooftop back in ‘81—
but this time my visual grammar parses
that deadly flight as if he might’ve landed
after all whole as newborn eggshell,
Pall Mall in his mouth the closest we’d
come to a cremation that day. And here
he is now, tucking phantom twigs into
the suttee in his fastidious way, drawling
something like better to be late to my own
funeral, than not show up at all. Maybe
Francis and all our figment dead have
shown up here now not to drop elegiac
spittle into the fire, but to remind us
the last thing we’ll each remember, or
see, or regret is the least combustible
fuel beneath this burning. And all our
dead —each one flitting in with a token
sprig of sage, or grief, of delight, or
surrender—agree it’s time to kindle
the tree bones, time for the young ones
to help us mount the wood pile. And
all our dead are happy: in a few smoky
moments, no longer submerged in our
memories of them, they’ll sigh O,
freedom—idle as a boat full of grasses.
The young ones are unsurprised by
how little remains of us in the end. Yet,
handed a jar the size of a soda bread
from the day-old bakery shelf, they
weep to find we weigh much more
than they’d ever dared imagine—weight
the sums of yearning, heft the kilos of
undoing, hectograms of ecstasies, tonnage
of walk, sleep, talk, wait. At last, it is done.
They have carried us beyond the wake of we.
Our theoretical mass, reduced to ashes and
sand, dives back, grit by grit, into the fire
from where it came.
—The Rush / Mount St Mary’s Los Angeles, April 2026
Sections