Am I Blue? Yep.

My uncle Mike died this morning from terminal cancer.

The Collapse of the Universe

When I was a child, lost
and numbed by holiday gatherings,
aunt agnes on the comfy couch, shouting,
I sought you out.

In the context of an arid field, my love
for you would be seeds and rain,
yo the unperturbed soil, grain
for grain mysterious and unknown.
your jokes a weightless break, a mist,
shattered the shadowy nighttime world
of my mother's family, gathered.

Gathering clouds threatened.
A car crash. A war. A brother without
a sense of stopping. Not my troubles, but
your own. A history I never knew.

You, an uncle, a friend. I wanted
to be like when I was smaller, my own
field yet wont to bloom, unable to know
itself without rooting through someone else.
And now, later in the seasons, the Earth
having turned its face away and
back again, my own life a mirror formed
of sand, always changing, ever fading.

A phone call and an email later. You
are gone. Clumsy words and clumsy letters. The dance
of grieving, of sowing seeds. We mourn
for ourselves because the land is gone.

And I am a farmer, by blood not
by right. My rough hands counting seeds and raindrop
flights. One for sorrow. Two for joy. Three
for you and me. Uncle and nephew,
the lost and the waiting to become, and
all the soil we've ever tasted, ever wasted
is stardust. We and all of the brilliant things
originally formed in the center of stars are
long division, slowly decaying into memory
and other intangible particles. Bits, bones, teeth,
and sinews, pearls and fingers and seeds, all these grains
we've been and come to be, even soil subdivides.

Standing in the kitchen of my grandma's house, watching
silently and waiting to be someone larger, someone
smarter, you looked me in the eye, you looked
and saw me as I was. A seedling rooted in the air.