Yahara Journal 2021

October, Broken Rena Medow If not the density of fruit flies in the kitchen, then the fragility of ice fractals lacing the window. If not the mouse whispering in the drywall, then the bat circling the attic, unable to sense the markable midnight breeze.

If not a dream where we are looking at purple wildflowers, then waking up to the first snow on my tomato plants, some of them unpicked, still green.

The mind then softly considering your grave—touched by the first snow, now and touched forever.

At night you join me.

We climb giant trunks of trees and sit in the audience of a never ending outdoor piazza. I ask you how it is to be gone, and you laugh at me, wearing double denim. I bring a bag of small green onions and coconut water to your parents’ doorstep, then I realize I left the wrong bag, the one with half-rotten apples covered in ants. I bike away, but the streets are all upside-down. If not the nonsense of the sleep-mind, then the depravity of the real asphalt, unchanged.

Tonight, I will fall asleep rehearsing your voice in my memory, making a figment of you reassure me. At your burial, I placed some flowers on your dead ankles. And I moved your dead body with a dead sheet.

You died again then, and every morning you die a little more. We buried you, but it wasn’t exactly you that we buried. You are all over town, overrunning my mind, weeds in the wind, some Debussy prelude overhead.

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