Tag Archives: death
My cat in heaven
Not apprehending time, my old cat says she will live forever. I tell her that in the last years — — of forever, which she does not apprehend — she will need other humans, that I will have gone ahead to answer to God, right after I plug in the heated bed, prepare her favorite […]
Everything again
What if memory’s just the dead, flourishing differently from how they flourished alive? — Carl Phillips, Stop Shaking Twenty-five years later, calm as compline, hushed as heavy snow, wired to a dozen impassive monitors, she left. Or rather, what remained, the mortal wound inflicted long ago: the loss, the betrayal, the accident that changed everything. […]
Star
I mistook your light for substance, though you burned out long ago, the celestial aspects of your small body subsumed by the dark gravity of one larger, and me forgetting how a dead star may nonetheless shine from an irretrievable past, a glory of extinction no astronomer could ignore, yet the core collapsing and collapsing […]
Restored
I saw you there the night before, a leggy black pearl against the glossy white tub, and made a note: Spider. Remove before showering. And the next morning remembered too late, and bore your sodden body to the sunny deck rail where I had meant to leave you, alive. And lay you there gently, lifted […]
Ghost pains
I. After I died, of course, form didn’t matter. Relief of a kind I could not articulate (lacking a mouth). I had been poured into genes; the body’s kismet commenced. I was not glorious; nor was I inadequate. My limbs worked. I had a heart, mysterious; a brain that could not understand it. I did […]
Cemetery
I dream they rise — the cowboys and soldiers, the housewives and teachers, the laborers — at some unknowable hour of secret, liminal nights, their coffins too small to contain their longing. Were they lost all their lives? Did they long to be visible, to be found, and are they, now, beyond the blind […]
Dear FEMA
Disaster Number 4498 requires a death certificate, cause clearly stated; an invoice, itemized, the date of our disaster — your demise — the cost of which can be deftly monetized in America, where any harm may be codified, indemnified in that coarse ledger, as if we should be, could be, compensated, reparated; our fragments […]
This urn; these ashes
Your ashes near, I drive you home, headlights on; a funeral procession of one. I imagine everyone pulls over, heads bowed, hands over hearts for you, a good man. I am too somber. The time of disease, of dementia, is over. Now, I can remember how you made us laugh. Now — in a form […]
The young farmer’s widow considers the harvest
You say nothing and what could you, what words can tongue the abruptly absent body? You will long for shock once it dissipates, but now this fearful frenzy, all that must be done when nothing can be done: the obit, the funeral, receiving the food, the cards. Helplessness weights the air like humidity in storm-bruised […]
Meditatio Ephemera 