Sad, so I think of my dead dog Sasha,
and Josh’s dead dog Gracie, and living dogs and cats
doing dog and cat things and people doing people things
like laughing at the Steven Wright joke: if you believe
in telekinesis, please raise my hand. I’ve been accused
of joking in poems but any funny stuff I’ve written
is serious, like Knock knock: who’s there: your dead mother:
my dead mother who: your dead mother who you never figured out
how to talk to. I know, that’s not funny but true,
in the same way a fiddle with no strings is beautiful
in its need to be listened to even harder with imagination.
After weather, and work for me and health for her, we were done,
out of topics other than silence, which we especially
never discussed. I’ve been thinking of her and the dead generally
as shadows that brush my closed eyes when I rest my head
against the window of a train and everything standing still
rushes by. The flick and flutter of filtered light.
The rocking of the train like a crib or boat. A smaller going
inside the larger going of my life. Sad, so I think of my mother
climbing a tree and beckoning me up, into the womb of the branches,
a conversation of hands and reaching, of sitting somewhere
near the top, a few crows laughing at our crippled version
of flight, which nonetheless brings us closer to a way
of being quietly together, as we were at the start.