For I,

I thought of you and bullets and the husk of ruin we are feeding
our children, saying swallow, it will make you strong, in the end,

but I know. When I sat the other day with my own loneliness—
as I have been taught—near people, but not, I listened to them

ask about one of their group, who was missing. Dead. Fell off
a ladder. They laughed & it was true. One man said I hope

he suffered before he passed. He should have known better.
Then they swapped stories of near-misses and dumb decisions

they should not have survived. Plugging a router into an amp.
Stringing holiday lights in the rain. I guess it’s hard to know

which side of balance we are on. Until it’s not. I’d like to stay
on the opposite shore of cruelty for as long as I can, which is

why I was sitting alone, why I’m teaching my son to swim,
to keep his head bobbled above enough to breathe.

The night my mother passed, I dreamt the town was flooded
and she was alone in a room, wallpaper peeling as if the print

of yellow daisies were windswept, not wilting. She was waiting
in a wooden chair, a concerto echoing through the walls. When

I asked how long, she said days. The water up to her knees.
I was the one who carried her home. When I got home,

I looked up the man’s obituary and I kid you not, he was on
that ladder trying to save a cat from a too-high branch before

the storm folded into flood. Do you think that he tasted lighting
before it struck? What if the last thing we taste of this world

are lemons? Not bitter, not rust, but one placed in white bowl
on the counter. The light around it loudening yellow.

The rush of juice dissolving to the last sprinkle of sugar.
A kindness. A single note held on a violin.

Photo by Randy Fath.

Obituary

the stonecoast review