The Dead
Yes, it’s like this. You are walking in a field, and the field’s
gathered by a few trees that become a sun-splintered
woods, and then after your father staggers in the yard, a mother
goes, perhaps nursed long by a sister at home, the woods
become forest, and when that lover—first kissed beneath
a fire escape’s trellised pattern on W. 45th St.—dies in Paris,
those spruce grow taller as you see again the five oranges
spilled from her bag, rolling across the green carpet
where you both crawled, mute animals, in that room grown
wider by grasp, more desperate now in memory, in this
steep shadow, where those oranges, minus the one
shared, carillon briefly, eating darkness, making a shell
of burnished light where you can kneel and begin to listen,
hungry again for those raw, pressed sounds to make the dark shine.
Originally appeared: The Southern Review, Fall 2021.
