She stands
in the airy apartment,
old oak floors
honeyed in October light
and one cat about to die.
The air sticky. Sweet
with the after-ripeness of 
loss long gone echoing 
with each autumn leaf that falls
like he did, between two houses,
gone to rescue the neighbor’s
cat. His heart just stopped
and with it all their imagined
trajectories, stranding her
in this strange empty space
called home.
                        

Rain the day before. The muddied churchyard 
sunk my heels, turned my silver sling backs into flats.
My dress, a surprising sheath of lace, for you 
my love, and plain as blossoms. Everyone 
was there/not there. Embodied,
or in notes and talismans. You wore my father’s tux.
Nana’s golden wave of bangle shimmered on my wrist. 

Our vows, late in life and lucky, echoed 
off the whitewashed walls like plainsong, 
threading diamond notes of re-found romance 
through the drabness of the day until we all 
got drunk on giddiness. Laughing 
in that final pose on chancel steps. On the cusp 
of what happened next: the flash, the photo,
cancer, stroke, a row of deaths that funeraled 
down the aisle. 		I remember this: 
I held a simple tied bouquet of Lysianthus.

Lysianthus, like a rose. But lasting 
longer, my love. Lasting longer.
                        

after Rilke, The Book of a Monastic Life, I, 60

At the gutter edge where sidewalk meets street 
and detritus becomes loam, the unlikely
take root—grass, moss, a flourish 
of Queen Anne’s lace. Yesterday 
a single sunflower like a beacon
in the cracked sea of concrete and fast cars.
Backlit by the afternoon sun, glowing 
like an archangel shouting Be Not Afraid! 
as we crossed to stand under 
its aureolin splendor, petals haloed 
round the dense kernelled disk of dark
while goldfinches darted in and out like gilded Spitfires 
targeting seeds, anointing us with cracked shells
that we plucked from each other’s hair
all the way home.