The day before you died I thought I’d bring
You tulips for your bedside table, bright
Ones, pink and white, to give your gaze a place
To rest, to make your labor seem less harsh.
I told my daughter so, my four-year-old
Who’d told me I should visit you, who’d hinted:
Your work, this dying business you were in,
Was making worldly things seem flimsy, thin.
The day moved on and tulips left my mind, though,
Until I thought of you again, too late,
The night descending, bringing sleep’s regrets.
The morning came and with its obligations
Distracting me, I let my dream of tulip
Fields plow under and turned to hear the news.

The thirteenth floor does not exist, but here
We are. The elevator door won’t budge
And we are stuck inside with luggage piled
High. But when I turn around I see,
Beyond your giant suitcase and bright eyes,
Another door that opens towards a room
With Roman bed and blanket hemmed in lace
Waiting for us to lie down and embrace.
So I stop ringing the alarm and out
We step, your lovely brown and glad eyes laughing,
Mine blinking at equations my whole life
I’ve stumbled on, love the happy prime,
[You the prize beyond all superstition],
And thirteen years like days in Italy.

Zehm could blow you away on the guitar … During breaks at work,
he’d regularly buy everyone on the cleaning crew something to eat—
“a candy bar or anything else you wanted” … he always came to work
with a two-liter of Pepsi and a gallon of milk. “He said it kept his hair
shining and flowing.” —The Inlander

He wears a crown and plays guitar and hands
out Snickers bars to anyone who looks
like they might like one.
They didn’t have Snickers bars in heaven
when Otto arrived,
but now they do.
They didn’t have Diet Pepsi, either,
and they still don’t.
Otto said that wouldn’t be necessary.
But they do have milk,
by the gallon,
and the gallant cows they get it from
moo and murmur in harmony
when Otto plays his guitar—
his hair shining and flowing—
they moo like angels might
if angels could be cows,
they moo like Eddie Van Halen’s guitar would moo
if it were made of magic cowhide,
they moo and wail and their mooing
and wailing shake the mountains of heaven
when Otto plays the guitar,
the guitar that Jesus gave him
on the third day,
the day he was released from his chains.

When Otto looks through the mists of heaven
down into the realms of earth,
he sees his mother and smiles.
And he sees the turmoil,
the fretting and stealing,
the anxious knuckles, the discolored teeth,
the paychecks and the ATMs,
the St. Patrick’s Day parades
with officers in polished uniforms.
He sees the souls of his friends
and the soul of a girl named Amber,
the confused and clamoring
souls of our city, the city of man.
And he sees the dark soul
of the man who murdered him,
brooding in a garden in a back yard.
The man waits on the word prison
and eyes the turning spindle of obstructed justice.
Otto sees this man,
sees him clearly sometimes,
and his radiant soul is moved
with pity. His guitar cries out to this man
and the cows of heaven moo and give their milk.

[See also Justice for Otto Zehm is close at hand]