Birds of Malaiseville

God held my father’s face in His hands. This was it. “Earvin?” He said. “Earvin asked.”

Will they learn to clear tables? Be led expressionless by expressionless service dogs? Stare when a gift store visitor makes nervous conversation?

This is mostly how I remember the group and me in 1984: we talk about Jesus as brightly as we talk about Magnum P.I.

Gray had once overtaken black, and then gray became white: the diffused color of a cataract, of milk making clouds in water.

A bugler will play “Taps” but not “Hail to the Victors” because I lost the nerve to ask.

Orange mercurochrome stains from skateboarding in culottes in those abandoned apartment complexes in Santa Clarita.

I’ve gone to church for 50 years and have liked it best only when it’s over.

Eternity lengthens by the infinite energy of imperfection. My father-in-law will work forever and be content with God.

“He’s taking what Mr. Trump is taking!” my mother-in-law told my wife. “Don’t even,” I said.

I closed my eyes like blind Isaac and patted my goaty cheeks. “Esau? Is it you, Esau?”

Neither married nor given in marriage. That’s rich, tell her, coming from the world’s most desirable bachelor.

Older still, I lit them off my zipper, as I’d read Jim Morrison did.

Sweet gum maples. Blossoms like muscadine grapes on the locust tree I planted in our backyard so she could see it from our kitchen.

My sister would want you to know this about her: after I came along, her debt clock began clicking and remained dynamic all her life. She was owed.

This long in heaven my grandfather sees limits to perfection. When the weather turns, his scars itch.

“Thank you, please, but no,” I say when offered the soup. Dead people can’t eat in dreams, so it seems best that I don’t either.

Of the underwear band with the inside-out dashes. Of the stress-fracture walking boot and the mother outside the classroom.

He drives a truck that looks like a fighter jet and backs it in so it’s face-first. Always flexing.

Nothing much left to peck. Pelt. A saw-toothed spinal column. It’s a primitive heap. It looks like the invention of the bagpipe.

You and Jesus sit at a picnic bench, waiting for your name to be called: Gunther? James?

Feast of Cocked Hats. Holy Smell of Train Yard. Bread of Abandonment. Bread of Troubled Gums.

The grackle is a walker. The robin too. Songbirds? Hoppers. Pheasants and partridge?

The Devil is no help to my marriage. He makes nicknames for the clothes my wife wears that he knows I don’t like.

It’s no relief to be done with physical beauty. Some men can let go. Certain others, you and I, never stop measuring.

The last days of Great Bent Arrow. Old, lost Charlie Hustle. Hair as white as cocaine.

I began the eulogy with a literal truth: she was the tallest cousin in the family. Ended it with an apocryphal one.