I’ve got a home in Gloryland that outshines the sun
                    African-American spiritual

I thought about the dead and the myriad
as if they perched on my shoulder all the time
talking in my ear—though I can’t hear them,
stuck here in the ghetto of the living. Well then, let
the comfort of Gloryland and angels like cats of different
sizes with their fierce wings and purring blow
some semblance of faith back to me. And what
of my brother, dead, who clowning
held a gun to his head and blew himself
into the nebula sac while someone cried
come back. . . where in the name of dust
has he risen, what star claims him?
Tonight, under the bare bulb, no wind through
the dusty curtain, only the memory of the woman
on the silver bus clutching packages on her lap
who turned to me and said In the next world
I won’t have to carry anything,
and I almost added, Or wash my hair. And my feet
will be straight again, and point forward.
I should have said, I want to love better.
Or I should have turned to her so we
could rock together, shoulder to shoulder,
mute but full of the same desire to be
unburdened, redone as flint or air. And
I wanted to say what I sometimes remembered when
I was rich in remembering, how even the pitted bricks
on the buildings seemed brimming with love,
and how long it had been since I felt such things.
I wanted to tell her it was the light this side
of everything and no matter what happened
there would always be humming, a thin melody
of divine bees, rotting wood, the buzz of those
we no longer hear. Or I should have run
home and begged you to stay with me
in the city of the living, under star-ash,
under the roar of angels laughing and their
fingers long as rivers, with my bags of salt
and your eyes like trees drawing down
the light, since your name is more than
half-written and mine is traced in chalk,
and I could have told you what the dead know—
how failed I am in love, how much I’ve forgotten—
though I never again want to know the future
and I think it’s fine if the dead stay dead no matter
how much I miss them or all I never
risked for them, and I saw my hand
lifting into air as my hand passing through
a hundred worlds at once because the dead
are better at forgiveness, and now that I live
by a river I should get wet every day,
and if I want to feel how the dead move,
I should take up rowing.