If this world were mine, the stereo <br />starts, but can't begin <br />to finish the phrase. I might survive <br />it, someone could add, but that <br />someone's not here. She's crowned <br />with laurel leaves, the place <br />where laurel leaves would be <br />if there were leaves, she's not <br />medieval Florence, not <br />Blanche of Castile. Late March <br />keeps marching in old weather, <br />another slick of snow to trip <br />and fall into, another bank <br />of inconvenient fact. The sky <br />is made of paper and white reigns, <br />shredded paper pools into her afterlife, <br />insurance claims and hospital reports, <br />bills stamped "Deceased," sign here <br />and here, a blank space where she <br />would have been. My sister <br />said We'll have to find another <br />Mommy. <br /> And this is how <br />loss looks, my life in black plastic <br />garbage bags, a blue polyester suit <br />a size too small. Mud music <br />as they packed her in <br />damp ground, it's always raining <br />somewhere, in New Jersey, <br />while everyone was thinking about <br />fried chicken and potato salad, <br />caramel cake and lemonade. <br />Isn't that a pretty dress <br />they put her in? She looks so <br />lifelike. (Tammi Terrell <br />collapsed in Marvin Gaye's arms <br />onstage. For two hundred points, <br />what was the song?) Trampled <br />beneath the procession, her music. <br />Pieces of sleep like pieces of shale <br />crumble through my four a.m. <br />(a flutter of gray that could be <br />rain), unable to read this thing <br />that calls itself the present. <br />She's lost among the spaces <br />inside letters, moth light, moth wind, <br />a crumpled poem in place of love.<br /><br />Reginald Shepherd<br /><br />http://www.poemhunter.com/poem/how-people-disappear/
