from The Modie Box
I do not understand how I can be alive while you are dead. The field
white with snow and the absence of crops. Closer, the creamy brown clumps of
stalks, the world after harvest.
*
They offered you to us as a possible vegetable. A butternut squash,
perhaps, its pale warmth.
*
I took a box file and put everything I had of us into it—letters I
wrote you, cards you sent me, photos and postcards. I stuck on a label. Its
presence on the shelf reassures me.
*
Burnt toffee peanuts, salt water taffy, lightly sweet white wine,
Constant Comment tea, raisin bread toast, orange roughy, salmon, Polish
sausage, black olive pizza.
*
Death, resurrection, death. What could be more violent?
*
The line crackled, but I could still hear pain in your voice, if not
each precise word. I fought myself not to call back, to find a clear channel, to
extend or intensify your difficulty. If I’d known it’d be the last, I would
have succumbed to my selfishness. Without such knowledge, I nearly had, anyway.
I tried to allay my guilt for not calling back but wanting to by going online
for flowers at once.
*
This hunger unappeasable.
*
There is no redemption here. Sometimes I pick up the box and shake
it, and that absence, its dry sound, drags me to weeping.
*
Hazel eyes: sunlit wheat
*
The florist could say when the flowers had been left at the
hospital, but not if—
*
I begin to suppose I will never stop writing this poem so I,
agnostic, dubious of heaven, may keep talking to you.
*
Your body soft with loose flesh, your embrace a leaning into ease.
*
I wrote my first poem outside of class at age 11. We were camping in
Indiana, and I’d gone to the lake with my journal while you and Dad set up the
Steury. As soon as I finished the first draft, I dashed back to the site to show
it to you.
*
When you laughed hard or long, you wiped the corners of your eyes.
*
A lock of hair from youth: black-brown. A lock of hair from age:
hazel, glimmering honey brown, dye from a box.
*
Marigolds and mums, the only flowers she dared plant, they needed so
little care.
---
This piece originally appeared in Shearsman.
