"Blue Gloves, Stars"
"Forgive me, I have almost forgotten your face
in the three years you've been gone.
I have ruined your blue cashmere gloves.
There is pencil lead smudged on the fingers of the right one
from writing outside in winter, a gaping hole on the tip
of the middle finger, a snag on the knuckle of the thumb
where the yarn is unraveling like time.
Forgive me, I spilled coffee on one of your stories,
the long one about green glass and stars,
a woman abandoned in the dark.
I have changed the glass and stars
to the pale sea blue of your gloves.
But most of all, forgive me for pretending the story is mine.
I know that it's cheating you, me, the dead, the living.
But think of the universe, its fickle lights and lies.
I want something of you to be me.
I want you to be a story or a film I can watch every day.
I'll keep watching and watching until the stars say
their last lines and fall dead on the floor,
the celluloid flops on its reel after the credits roll,
the sound of a train going by, but not.
The ending of the movie will comfort me,
as if seeing death on the screen can cancel dying itself
or at least conceal you as you fly across a sweeping panorama
of the Pacific Ocean where we floated as children
and built sandcastles as high as our unlived lives.
I forgive you for being the first to die.
Before her time, people say when someone leaps and rises
above the Earth to reach the other world before we
think they should.
Forgive me if I am not convinced this is true."