AND, OH, HER LAUGH

I give you to the bubbles
that riot and rally
to rise in a champagne glass

silk riverlets rippling
across her thigh
as she laughs

I give you to her laugh

to the bright-hot and high air
of Spring down here
when our hopes and hants
grapple and rant
to lead the living
in a dance

I give you to the wine
the verse and rush
the wide open and rolling wild
fields, an expanse

where your smile won’t have to stop
and your spirit won’t have to be contained
by the cages
we’ve built for ourselves

and I know your smile will run on for a long time
so I give you to the lilies, B.
I give you to the lilies

IT’S WHAT PEOPLE DO

At the service we gave testimony to your giant and avuncular generosity of spirit.  I told them I would not be the writer I am without you. And I am the poet ain’t it, showing up in a jet black shark-skin, with a bouquet of lilies and bottle of chicken-white, flanked by women on the sun porch as we shook and cried.

The Prophet spoke on the act of affection, that you were so adept at and why we all felt so loved by you.   Your pat-of-butter got up, and she was gorgeous, told the story of the fox and the dove.  How the fox wasn’t cut out for killing and when he found the wounded dove he took her in. He kept her until she could fly free.  And in the winter when it was time for him to hibernate, she’d return.  She’d bring him berries and sustenance, and pay him her lovely attention until spring when it was time for her to fly free.

Brother Mick got up, told us when you wanted to drop the axe you would without compunction. That you weren’t polite. That when he was 3 months-old your Mom found you choking him in his crib. That the love you had for Jeff was different, a proper and not fratricidal brotherly-love. At once I saw the pathos of the living, that our suffering moves in a straight line and no one can escape it, but we should find for love until our time is up because when we go that’s all that will be left. I hugged Mick for these reasons and more, feeling performative and contrite.

I hugged those I hated and told those I loved that I loved them.  I hung out and drank chicken-white but it was a bad idea. The alcohol ineffectual.  There wasn’t anything to assuage the anxiety I was feeling, not knowing who to talk to or what to say if I did. I stood in your bedroom with her and cried.  You were gone.  Told her when I look at her I see the truth and she said she’d try but there’s nothing that needs doing about that.  It got dark, the sun set and people got shitty.  I don’t know why I should’ve been surprised, that they should go on raging like they did when you were alive.  But I knew it was just so, only what you would’ve wanted.  They danced and rallied as I stood alone on the sun porch, smoking and staring into the dark.

I couldn’t watch the remembrance reel a second time.  It kept you up on a screen and not gone like you were supposed to be so I made my way out back and found her there.  I sat down beside her and when they killed the interrogation beams of the motion-detector light I pulled her in.  Kissed her and asked her Is this inappropriate? and kissed her again.  I told her she was beautiful and she said she’d keep in touch.  I left as the women were cleaning up in the kitchen and the brothers were hugging everyone goodbye. I left without hugging anyone and got back to these bright empty rooms.

I fell out late, doom-scrolling and shoving handfuls of corn chips in my mouth.  I saw her online, frozen in celluloid and smiling in the blue light.  I woke up and it was cold and bright, gorgeous March in Austin.  Your weather.  I felt anxious. I was hungover, socially more than anything. I felt like a lech and a heel, getting shitty and lolling about at your funeral for another kiss, but it’s alright.  I know as bad as I acted you would've only approved.