poem freewrite in my office this morning in the midst of one hell of a busy month (or, my poems are getting strange)

Checklist

with an italicized line borrowed from Connie Hales' series of poems on the Utah massacres of 1857

All the interrogations I meant to loft. Check.

That one apology to make again, in a different form,

In this next decade, near that pot

Of purple leaves. Check. Mind. Body.

Spirit. The fourth world. Yes.

The smell of the newly dead, cooling around you. Yes.

All the heart's ventricles, the last prayers delivered---

Spoken, written, sent. Let the next world begin.