Password 


We're trying to get into Sue's computer
but we can't because she's dead. 

We don't know the password. 

Just last week I was sitting across from her
at the Thai restaurant and I could have asked her

and she would have told me. 

How little would have been required to cross

that threshold. Just a breath.
A movement of the tongue. A sound.

Walking in the forest today, down the road,

I found a long smooth tail feather from a hawk,
gray and black and dirty white. 

I brought it home with me.

I like how hard and stiff the quill is, like bone,
and yet how light, too, how hollow.

Holding it, you think of flight— 

though you also think of Dante 
and Shakespeare and Keats, 
dipping it in ink and starting to write.

-first published in The Cortland Review