A Year Later

The news made it darker,

a fall that led to death

a loss

that still sounds

depths

to many,

in whom words found homes

and melody eroded

everything

to bedrock

to make peace

with bones

after the wonders

of flesh.

The anniversary of loss:

one day and a year now

a death, and Trump's Presidency,

an unsilenced voice in song

prophesying

the iconic failure of democracy

on a dying planet.

Ironic

Davidic,

sentenced to pages

to the turntable

to the radio

to Youtube and Vimeo clips

to old CBC interviews

in a lucid, gravel-rumbling baritone

as gentle as mourning.

His caustic

distillations of darkness and fire

flicker obsidian light
through clefts in bass and treble,

spattering serenity

with the evocative clarity

of Old Testament sentience.

His was the wisdom

of a Lurianic messenger:
there will be no peace in a shattered creation

because the creator broke us all
entering the Beloved.

Leonard's fall

to cancer

ate all hope but death's
lack of dominion.

His longings emptied into

family around him;

into friends, into one time lovers

into collaborators in song
into books in hand:

into us

who heard ourselves

in his griefs, shames,
and righteous indignations;
we, who still fill his notations of yearning
into our own experiences.

He seared beauty;

traced scars of hope

across shared lifelines:

his understandings,

chambered by his klezmer voice

and ecclesiastical passions,

were made one with indulgence,
with whimsy, united by ecstatic yearnings

convicted
by common failings
and by soaring needs,
argent for transcendance.

His bleak vision

metastasized our extraordinary,

estranged existence;

bled emanations of transposed light
to offer up one last possible fragment

of victory in surrender,
the blazing glory
of the bonfire set
in the wreckage
of ever getting it right, the
sacred impermanence
of the burning heart.