"Grief."
"Grief walks miles beside the polluted river.
Grief counts days sucked into the winter solstice.
Grief receives exuberant schoolyard voices
as flung despisals.
It will always be the 1st of September.
There will be Dominican boys, whose soccer game
provides an innocent conversation for the two people
drinking coffee, coatless.
There will be sunset rose light on the river like a cathedral.
There will be a rusty, amusing tugboat,
pushing the barge home.
Did she think she knew what her friend intended?
Did she think her brother rejoiced to see her?
Did she think she'd sleep one more time
till sunrise holding her lover?
Grief has got no brother, sister, or lover.
Grief finds friendship elsewhere.
Grief, in the darkened hours and hours
before light flicks in one window, holds grief, a mirror.
Brother, he was dead in a war-drained city.
Grief was shelling peas with cold water,
running in the sink.
A harpsichord trilled Corelli until the phone rang.
And when grief came home from a post-op nightwatch,
two small girls looked reticent over homework.
Half the closet, half the drawers were empty.
Who was gone this time?
Grief is isolationist, short-viewed.
Grief lacks empathy, compassion, imagination,
reads accounts of massacres, floods, and earthquakes
mired in one story.
Grief is individual, bourgeois, common, and banal,
two women's exchange in Sunday market:
"Le mari de Germaine est mort."
They fill bags with apples.
Grief is primagravida in her fifth month.
Now, she knows the fetus has died inside her.
Now, she crosses shopping streets on a sun-shot midwinter
morning.
Winter licks the marrow from streets that open on to parks,
and boulevards, rivers, river-parallel parkways,
arteries to bridges, interstates, airports.
Grief daubs kohl on middle-aged, burning eyelids.
Grief drives miles not noticing if a highway runs
beside an ocean, abandoned buildings, or blackened wheat
fields, and in fact, she's indoors.
Although her height is average, massive furniture
blocks and crowds her.
Oak and pine, warm gold in their grain she thought
would ransom her season.
Workmen clear a path to repair the windows,
not with panes of light on their backs,
no message bearers these.
Still stubbornly green, a street leads back to the river.
14 years drained into the 15 minutes
that it took a late summer sun to douse
its light behind the opposite bank, the boys
to call their match over."