for Haas (1965–2007)

No one can recall the Scrabble word you played
just before you rose, walked over to the window, smiled
and looked beyond your city of figs and fires.  Wine

still chilly in the glass (your love brimming), eggplant
poised for peeling, the salmon yet uncooked.  No one
knows what flight you boarded (that moment) when

you stepped outside your flesh. Or which exotic port
inhaled so fast you disappeared before the jetway closed.
Your new continent surely must be rife with verbs

only in the present tense:  “sip,” sauté,” “uncork,”
“embrace.”  A place you’ll write us from and say,
“Come—the sun is shining on the sea, curtains

blowing, ladders tumbling to the sky. You’ll love it
here.”  We’re too busy in a time zone far from yours,
sorting out the past, spelling out a future without you,

counting scores of unfamiliar words like “dead,”
and “heart,”  “breath,” and “soil.” Picking up
the scattered tiles, we wish you’d left a clue, a cryptic

noun tucked safely on the triple word, something minced
and juicy to decipher. Funny how it is, though, when
the word we think we need no longer fits.

The game goes on. All seems lost until,
our palettes fat with O’s and U’s, we draw an X or Q. 
(All those U’s!)  Now it’s clear:  You, the giver of so much,

have offered us a turn to rearrange those mixed-up
tiles. To make you ours with words we make: Consonants
move shyly toward the vowels and you take shape, as if

TENDERNESS is word made flesh. EYELASH opens up
the double letter falling on the H. GATE and PASSPORT
are firmly fastened to MERLOT and LONGING.

There’s QUEST and FATHER, too.  EXIT leads us
to the far edge of the board, where OLIVE joins with VISION—
and all we see is OCHRE, UMBER, WHEAT, and  FIRE.