Tipton Poetry Journal
Writing the Eulogy Wendy Taylor Carlisle My dead men wait for me to write them out, standing around, lounging like city kids waiting for a pick-up game or a cop to open the hydrant— man with a baseball growing in his head, man with the wit, the one who wrote, the one who shriveled around his florescent veins. They all look as strange to me as my lover’s face in the midst of a quarrel. Moreover, I don’t remember their lives’ details My departed wait for me to tell you something I know about them— what I know is the prison window I stare from, tongue-tied, illiterate of curses. What I know best— how their death feels to the deserted.
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