If this world were mine, the stereo starts, but can't begin to finish the phrase. I might survive it, someone could add, but that someone's not here. She's crowned with laurel leaves, the place where laurel leaves would be if there were leaves, she's not medieval Florence, not Blanche of Castile. Late March keeps marching in old weather, another slick of snow to trip and fall into, another bank of inconvenient fact. The sky is made of paper and white reigns, shredded paper pools into her afterlife, insurance claims and hospital reports, bills stamped "Deceased," sign here and here, a blank space where she would have been. My sister said We'll have to find another Mommy. And this is how loss looks, my life in black plastic garbage bags, a blue polyester suit a size too small. Mud music as they packed her in damp ground, it's always raining somewhere, in New Jersey, while everyone was thinking about fried chicken and potato salad, caramel cake and lemonade. Isn't that a pretty dress they put her in? She looks so lifelike. (Tammi Terrell collapsed in Marvin Gaye's arms onstage. For two hundred points, what was the song?) Trampled beneath the procession, her music. Pieces of sleep like pieces of shale crumble through my four a.m. (a flutter of gray that could be rain), unable to read this thing that calls itself the present. She's lost among the spaces inside letters, moth light, moth wind, a crumpled poem in place of love.
Added: 30 Sep 2002 | Last Read: 23 Feb 2019 5:49 PM | Viewed: 4580 times
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