Incommunicado Grief

For Charles Randall Stanfield

The quick and the dead

I wrote you sonnets. You were dead, though, then.

I sat in Keats’s garden while I read

Them into Hampstead wind.  Among all men

You were the only.  In my heart and head

Molasses had been poured, a coma thick

Upon them.  While the heart could still pump on,

While mind moved on, a darkness slowly quick

In biblical significance brought dawn

Of doom.  I read but throat and mouth and teeth

Could not enunciate, or, rather, air

And sunlight stumbled when they tried beneath

The treacle.  Stabbing tongue could only stare.

Blind tongue!  Blind tongue could barely let the lines

Come out.  It could not speak the deaf man’s signs.

©  Phillip Whidden