The Lonely Good Company of the Dead
        after J.D. McClatchy

Now that they are gone, they are everywhere.
            Take Bill Potter, for example:
my scrawny uncle who grew to manhood
            as one unhumbled by man or beast
yet respectful of the minutiae of night fishing.
            If anything remains it is always a gift
to be carried along. Isn't a knife he fashioned

in his workshop connected to wanting to carve up
            and consume the soft flesh of the world?
He had a stereo, an RCA. High-fideliiy
            and expensive. When I visited,
I'd flip through LPs. Gospel mostly—Elvis—
            which he trusted me to put on.
The dead, not the living, steer. And in the going

they chart a more or less perfected course.
            So this poem serves as a map, his and mine,
scribed from a fascination for what's shiny
            and spills out as gospel. So much is chance
or beaten out of us that what stays is spirit.
            The rest is an insurrectionary gadgetry
may (or may not) haul in fish from the darkness.

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Copyright © 2019 Roy Bentley All rights reserved
from American Loneliness
Lost Horse Press
Reprinted by Verse Daily® with permission