If you want to live, I will carry you.

If you want to die, I will bury you.

— Meridian Smith, The Happenine Book

I want to live long, brother—I can say it with you now.

Even longer than our young-blooded friends

who don’t blame me for being idle here

in Mirabel-aux-Baronnies among the wild

and wildflowers, in this maybe-last summer.

Southern country moves slow as tar—

slower than every man who tries to grasp it.

Plump, black bumblebees odalisque above my altar,

and then fly on—unsung angels—

while cypress trees that line the crooked roads

sway like a child’s hand,

telling of even more lazy days ahead.

As it happens — as it always happens at dusk —

we crowd around the edges of a mighty plank of oak,

our thankful fingers drum the pure white linens,

under a clamor of clinking silver and red goblets

exactly as they do it here on any given day

if the day is wondrous, and it is.

The sun pours down on us, Orator!

I lift a chalice in your honor for the second time tonight.

Night of your grand escape.

“I’m dying,” we sing, as if drunk.

“But may it be long coming.” For if I can

outlive you this time, I surely will try.

Our brethren mock this brand of life-greed.

But greed for life sates the blood like a cut serpent.

Joy and sorrow coiling up the inner helix

as an ankh on a Sumerian healer’s wall.

That richness propels me, almost stumbling

like your whirlwind through the sacred bathhouse,

in a fury of highest puja, all alone there,

but the two of us up to necks in steam.

We must be willing to die, you said.

Not elsewhere, but here.

So tell me again how it is now

as snowflakes melt on your gilded neck

and you slit the veil of being with a scepter

made for kings to see us in our Southern folly.

(for Donald Webley, February 20, 1952 - June 3, 2013)