For Grammy, on a hillside in the Botanical Garden

Burnt ochre brush tangles
Everything overgrown
And trees like scarred old men
Leaning against each other
Like old brothers of Civil War battles
the ochre tangles their blood
come up from the ground
Growing over them as if to say
"Here is what you lost,
It will reclaim you in the end."

Old church steeples and long graveyards
Stretched out for miles
In fresh plowed early spring earth
Lime and cutting metal
And a lone porchlight.
The tavern sign and boozy jukebox
With old men like gnarled trees
Hands shaking the glass to lips
Brown butter whiskey
Two moonbeam headlights in the rain
To pick them up and rock them home.

"I'll put you in the light"
And she did, gray wheezy-breath
All choked and dying
And not forgotten. Small images
Of butterfly in stone in her rock
Garden, tender fingers in the dough
Maybe like her daughters' fingers
And large glasses, pale eyes
Smiling eyes, kind eyes, tough eyes
Who believed in you. "Here is what
You lost, she will reclaim you in
The end."

Darkness All Over

She was a caretaker
a creator a world beater
somehow taken down
by this numbing thing
so vital and so lost
all at once, as if time
compressed into a moment
and I saw, all at once,
who she was at every time
in her life; a therapist's chair;
a soccer ball; gently nervous
on a stairway, me asking her out;
the good and the bad all at the same time
as the rattle broke in the back of her throat
and nestled somewhere deep within me, a
sadness, a grief all of the sudden
replaced this living person
with a living cry
at 2 am rolling
over and her
gone.