By Sammy Greenspan
of sudden knowledge — you’re not dead after all —
but here among us, we the living, reading poems
into the night in a little café by the sea.
I turn to a friend: My god, Karen’s still alive after all,
but he tells me No, she’s dead, tilts his head
in your direction, and I turn back to the desiccated
husk of you, propped headless on the pillows.
The shock wakes me salt-eyed, nailed to the mattress,
my jagged little grief no amends for how I failed
you — solemn, quiet-angry the last we met and me
so clueless. Again the sun returns, Karen, spring
sliding in with its smiley face weather, chipmunk
and chickadee. The hole you left grows charred lips,
ash shivers out on a warm wind that stirs new green
on the birches as their inked bark begins to loosen.
Smooth stones we set one upon the next so earnestly,
our little wall crumbles in the years of rain and heat
as your traces seep from the world.
