You’re caught between those sheaves of light; your
mother; her baby. She’s dead now. Her voice
left in the body as weather finds itself recorded
as do rings in a tree. A divergence, the rest of us until
we also aren’t. It goes on like that, a story of regret
and oncology. When they incinerate the body something
like water is drawn from you. I thought of it as nothing,
an earthquake. Everywhere else, the smooth glide
of knees and summer showers. There wasn’t much
else I could do with the ashes, so they rode thunder
on the bench beside me. When it rained I thought it
appropriate I let myself get soaked, and a girl in
a red dress under an transparent umbrella stopped
and held her hand out. Oh mother, what you can’t
hear is the drowning of my sorrow now as you couldn’t
hear it in my absence. Missed chances. But not just ours.
David Dodd Lee is the author of ten books of poetry, is a visual artist, and Editor-in-Chief of 42 Miles Press.
A-Minor 