for Anthony Bourdain & Kate Spade

 

I am a stupid and simple soul

 

for if love can be addressed on the path to Paradise

or shift the sheer being of material things

on the bed stand, in the kitchen, in the garden;

 

if love can speak of crowns and cowardice,

or cows moaning on the way to slaughter

entrails and organs, brains and offal–

 

how is it this paradox still stands before me

like the headline of the suicide

of a celebrity chef or a designer

 

who were clearly loved and left a child

to imagine the world without them;

and if love can lay drunk and moaning

 

on a hotel bed for the chance to sleep

when the beloved is miles away and the one

so desired is sleep and sleep and sleep,

 

how can there be no sex can cure this,

no taste bedevil this, no colorful handbags of

promises to bring one back from the brink,

 

and though I have come back many times,

how could I be one of the lucky ones

neither famous nor infamous

 

but in comfort nonetheless

as I know whence my next meal will arrive

and my beloved will prepare it

 

and I will wash the dishes and sweep the floor

and the dark will settle upon

our house as if it were not a call to enter

 

which I hear whispering still beneath

her voice telling me we are not yet done,

come to bed anyways and sleep my love

 

***

David Mura’s newest book is A Stranger’s Journey: Race, Identity and Narrative Craft in Writing. He has written four books of poetry, the latest The Last Incantations, and two memoirs, Turning Japanese and Where the Body Meets Memory.