Category: Death
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Old elm (revised)
Abandoned farmhouse, graying outbuildings. In your final winter, you stood with empty, cracking branches to tell us plain that your kind shade would be gone – My father, too, would warn us so in his gruffled, dying voice to give us time to account, to record, to not be frightened. Empty sky. Time unwinds. I…
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Visitation
Even the spires of milkweed bend over in the low tumble of wind through the prairie, dry reeds tapping hollow on ancient gravestones. When I left you here, the ground was frozen and wet, with pelting sleet leaving a pebbled sheet on the grass, the canopy, the cars. How different it feels in August now,…
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Effigy Mound
In my belly, now flat, curled a spine with indistinct tissue wrapped around its tiny bones like those of a bird. I imagine them now bleached by the sun and gathered by the wind into some sheltered corner like pickup stix. In that corner, sand, brittle leaves, acorns layer alongside, under, above and make another…
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11/20
Earth grieves each November, again finds itself wailing in sorrow, refusing to get out of bed. For its own tears and distresses, the world collapses into itself, spends the month grinding through cold damp, discordant winds, while its resistance slips away into the long lonely meditation that always follows death. ———- From Li Po, “Listening…
Poems from in between 