Strophe: Letter to Known Address

I’d hoped the death date on my granite stone

might fall twenty years hence. Age eighty-seven

has a nice ring, two decades to atone

for sin and purify my soul for Heaven.

Last year I wrote, “You won’t be waiting long

before I read you David on your cloud.”

Alan, I ask you pray that I stay strong

while the silk worms are knitting up my shroud.

These seven hundred pages in two years,

these dreams directed by the Holy Ghost,

are a great gift as my race’s finish nears.

Let Anpiel come from the heavenly host

to guide my footsteps to the end of days

I have devoted to my Maker’s praise.

Antistrophe: Holy Cross Cemetery

No to my family, I shall lie with him,

a new country graveyard, young maple trees

and spruces that he loved, two Seraphim

adoring Mary. There on grass-stained knees

I pray not for the sake of Alan’s soul.

King David saw to that. I ask that he

speak to our Lord, all fates in His control.

Alan, look down from Heaven, pray for me.

There shall we lie, insensate to the wind

that scours the prairie so incessantly,

the two of us, redeemed who gravely sinned

but turned our faces to the Trinity.

Only our ashes, no skeletal bones,

poet I have engraved on both our stones.

Epode: To Msgr. Robert Laliberte

Serve my few guests the feast that doesn’t fatten.

            Let them say Kyrie

            in Greek and let you pray

Missa pro defunctis for me in Latin.

When Alan died you said that poetry

            was author of his turn

            to faith, making him yearn

for higher truth, a stirring homily.

How strange we unbelievers found ourselves

            steered by the Holy Ghost,

            fed by the sacred host,

each other’s books gracing each other’s shelves,

his passions complementary to mine,

thrown together as if by some design.