.
She cleared the leaves away for the last time.
Leaving the broom on the wall of silence,
her hands move to the lone tree of our backyard.
They stand there, with their wrinkled time-eaten skin,
looking down the road, to some place not here.
My mind draws her carefully, making up her life,
holding the shadows of her sorrow,
I invent treasures that could have caused it.
Like a passerby looking for home, I try
not to want it – the intimacy of shared history.
I turn away from all that I cannot have.
I move the pots, directing the orchestra
of dismantlers to some spot
that they have forgotten to take apart.
I tell myself, all this can be put back together
in some other place away from violence.
Again and again we can create, I told her last night,
barely believing it myself.
I dreamt all night of everything dying,
of my tired hands, and the door that disappears
once we pass through it, like some sick story
where we are taught to embrace the fact
that all things naturally end,
except that they don’t.
it rains in my heart 