March 23, 1993
Twenty years gone and we
remember in moonless night
(when stars
smudge endless sky and footsteps
creak on stairs)
whom the dead have come to visit.
We remember your face
in the dark, old smile painted
onto wooden lips, rash of eyes
shivery touch of paper
hands, figure hunched and shrunken
near vision’s edge.
In furnace hum we tap
the bottom of an old song
(hollow
baseline thrum or hint of lyric
in silver-threaded tune).
When morning spills gentle
mist across our bedroom floor,
we remember
nothing – not the owl’s
hollow, injured cry nor the crumbling
picnic shared by lost friends
wailing in the night.
Or maybe we remember cats
screeching at the fence line,
throaty ballads of the twanging frogs.
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