Afterlife
Not his human ghost, but the animal
he’d become, led me
through nightblack grass, the path
a knotted lead, wavering, always
forward. Half way up the rise,
pale, rubbing its haunches
against the sky with a camp pot grain
of stars, his shape a grey—
hound, a rabbit, a goon. Familiar
despite his lost face. Someone
I knew, though I’d slowly let him
go until there were runs of days
I didn’t think of him at all. But here,
cresting the hill to look
at such dark water rolled
to the edges. Hello, said the sea
though it would not recognize itself.
in some future time
What if, for us, there is no dark
no cold dripping November spruce, no
headstones, not even
a name, the seasons saying
relent with each drip. What if
vetch and sweet pea tire of their work—
honeysuckle exhausts its bloom? When the last
visitor, a century ago tossed an apple
it grew, but now gives up its twisted limbs, what then,
when one of us is not here to hold
the other crookedly—when even the name of this
small town is smudged, moved
from remember to—I really don’t
want this to be melancholy
so the chickadees catch the light the top
of the alder we know
has to be taken down. Is this departure
or regret—how a constellation
hangs over the house, faithful painting
an entire season, and abruptly
the picture’s gone askew? We don’t believe:
there is a point beyond what can be
repaired between us,
that there will be a time
without our names.
