Memorial

Everywhere she dies. Everywhere I go she dies.

No sunrise, no city square, no lurking beautiful mountain

but has her death in it.

The silence of her dying sounds through

the carousel of language, it’s a web

on which laughter stitches itself. How can my hand

clasp another’s when between them

is that thick death, that intolerable distance?

She grieves for my grief. Dying, she tells me

that bird dives from the sun, that fish

leaps into it. No crocus is carved more gently

than the way her dying

shapes my mind. – But I hear, too,

the other words,

black words that make the sound

of soundlessness, that name the nowhere

she is continuously going into.

Ever since she died

she can’t stop dying. She makes me

her elegy. I am a walking masterpiece,

a true fiction

of the ugliness of death.

I am her sad music.