Poem of the Week

Anniversaries circle round again. My grandparents

marrying in the sun. The guests in their best attire.

The filled vaulted room. Then the clinking glasses.

Then the private rites of those who waited long.

It is there in the light. Light that is a window.

And is a mirroring seas for my grandmother

out in the sailing ship of her wedding dress. Her ashes.

Someone I loved dying alone. The month the wide frame

of her final leaving. It was also her birth month. Light

opens its window, and is window upon window.

Her living hair darkens beyond its living black.

That black is another light, no visible sun

burning in its origins but a dark transparency,

and it arrives like another her, again and again.

I too am a window. In August, two people

among the dead look out of it. They do not know

the window is me. And I am what a window can wish.

To open endlessly because it is light,

and because it is a mirror, let the silver erase itself

and arrive and wait flawless on the glass,

and darken, and erase itself, like life, like death.