The Searchers

Curled and inert, an El Greco Christ:

death has pulled your form so long, forlorn. 

What church father said we were urinum and feces,

urinum, sputum, and phlegm?

As if these last moments of wet last release,

the bloody catheter and the mucosed lung,

could take from me, my bicameral mind,

with a chamber owned solely by you;

with a net of live neurons, a billion or more

imprinted on your face alone,

on the sight of you, bending, tall at the door

smiling and coming home.

On the memory of your strong arms, young and hard,

lifting me up when I fell,

like John Wayne in The Searchers lifted Natalie Wood,

when a nail pierced my foot through my shoe.

As rusty we became, as foreign to each other,

till this parting, in your arms, in this embrace. Proschai.