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      September 2, 2015In DiminuendoRichard Fenwick

      My brother’s last word
      was a cough, a type of struggle
      to tell his wife one lasting,
      proper thing that she might hold.
       
      Maybe he wanted to say how
      he loved the way she laughed,
      or perhaps he desired to confess
      that one night, after they wed,
       
      he’d slid into their bedroom
      to listen to her sleep, how strong
      it made him feel to draw
      inside him all of her sounds,
       
      so clean, that sort of sleep
      that dissolves only to songbirds,
      early mornings when the sun
      casts but a hint across the sky.
       
      My brother’s last word
      was a cough, and that is all.
      Yet within it was the gift
      of his giving, which I choose:
       
      how September relinquishes
      to fall and berries, how summer
      glides down, in diminuendo,
      into the lower moans of winter.

      from #48 - Summer 2015

      Richard Fenwick

      “I work with Holocaust survivors, so I attend an inordinate number of funerals here in Tucson. At a recent funeral I watched wisps of clouds tatter the blue sky as a tumbleweed bounded over the cemetery until it disappeared into an arroyo. A poem later emerged that fused these images to the funeral. This is why I write poetry: searching for metaphor that might make sense of the senseless.”

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