When They Fall
            for Gene Frumkin 
                        (italicized lines from his poem
                        “Let the Lines Stand”)

Everywhere, today, something missing.

The wind blowing.  Shelves upon shelves of books

that will never again hold, be held,

the embrace of eyes and words, hands and covers,

fingers and pages, minds and minds not bound by death.

Our words are the clasp that holds us/ together

The present tense flickers and is gone.
Was eclipses Is.  A million wishes sprout in the soil of Can’t.

Can’t now.  Could have then.  Could Have, a vine wrapping

every new breath.  Patience.  Let the lines stand

Staring down grief, like Jack Gilbert.  The clatter

of dishes again today at the diner, dining alone.

The waitress watching for her regulars,

remembering cream or sugar, wheat or white.

It will be hard to erase each other 

What life lives on?  Empty planters rattle in the wind.

Vacant house aching.  The messages unanswered, unreceived.

Unless the page is not paper or screen, and words are more

than written or winged, thicker than easy passage from now to then

EPIPHANY    
for Gene Frumkin, 1928-2007
                         By Maryhelen Snyder              

Your house was roof and walls for words
in which for words’ sake we met
amid your books stacked like half-columns 
of a Parthenon now sacked or in-the-making, 
either way a mortal temple to our common god. 

Your bathroom was a metaphor for matter.
Walls, soap dish, toothbrush, toilet seat, all
scratched, marred, stained so that what
remained was art and relevance. I imagine
at night in gratitude for text or terrified

of chaos not constrained, wraith-like 
you slipped between the thickening hedges
of books grown wild around your narrow bed, 
and lay down, almost bodiless, along your
leaning pad and broken springs, and slept.

Beware, you warned us, of epiphany, of 
closure, and of such excess as “again, 
again.”  Yet I recall curving my way 
through your zig-zag poems as through 
a thicketed dream overgrown with color,

sex and a sense of the hunt gone nowhere
known, until at every ending
you lifted me out into that sudden clearing 
where ground and heaven meet, 
again, again. 

So Long, Gene
                        By Carl Mayfield

There’s enough silence now
to hear what you said.
I keep snippets of your language
in my pockets because otherwise
the coins get lonely.
And there is no translation
for the way the poker chips feel
when the news reaches them.

We have one life to share
which is mysterious to others,
even more so to ourselves.
Yet you were always
where I found you,
listening and speaking
as though it mattered.
It does matter, and I’m still listening.