Suppose you remember them with bonfires, with rosaries 
made of wooden-looking beads, with underlined philosophy
books and scratched 45 RPMs.  Suppose 
you replay their touch, the linen-covered table, what was 
said there.  Will the dead be less dead?   
Will they say what stood behind them at the end? 
 
What I want now is the small prayer of his answer, 
a song in the greenhouse, his conversation in the Plymouth.  

I jog after the rain, my socks as wet as his were when he waded 
through the oily ditches while the skies flared.  
There. and There. I murmur.  

But there is no way to utter one word to a dead man 
you didn?t say to him alive.  You can only release his things? 
a lamp, the blue chair, his bed where I wake and sleep and wake again.