There was a full moon,
A clean, gold hole
Cut in the sky.
Someone began calling your name,
Rhythmically,
Beating on the moon like a gong.
The next day,
The moon rose in the sky with the sun.
I was afraid.
By that time, I knew.
You had so many faults:
Conceit, selfishness, supersitiousness,
Impatience, a leathery heart.
No one will say that now.
If you had been good?
I owe you so much.
Death wakes memory,
That sleeping beast.
I thought I had nothing to regret.
There are so many ways of being a fool.
She wore a black veil.
Her veil was mysterious:
Her face, covered with small black crosses,
An entire graveyard, worn on each cheek.
She belonged to you.
You belonged to her, but not as well.
Probably we were wrong.
Possibly you had never belonged to her at all--
Or to us.
We believe what we need to believe.
I couldn't see her.
She couldn't see you,
As if we were all caught in a sea fret,
And later, we described to one another
What we thought we had seen.
Snow is falling here now,
That strange bridal
Drift through the air to the ground;
And the summer's dead flowers
Bloom again,
And the meadow is once more
A clean, white page,
Trackless,
A thick snow, and rapid,
Like feathers, as if every angel
That ever lived
Was doing its fast and furious dying.
And thus winter is married to summer.
And even in this grey
I can see that the days grow longer.
When spring comes, it will be
The first spring without you.
If I am watching the snow
Surely you can see it. Until now,
I never understood that I thought
You could see
Whatever I saw.
Does every death do this?
Leave a hole somewhere?
In the sky,
In a round circle in the ground,
Like a tiny well,
Yet somehow large enough
To swallow us all.
I see you at the bottom of that well,
And the circle of wood
Covering the well-mouth,
And you, suddenly realizing
You are about to be shut up
In the dark.
She is bending forward, toward something.
For an instant, she lifts her veil.
The black crosses remain on her cheeks.
I see they will always be there.
The falling rain washed our faces,
The ground turned to mud, so quickly.
Umbrellas opened like mushrooms.
A blackbird cawed in the trees.
The mud sucked at our shoes,
Trying to keep us,
There, where you were.
No one was crying.
Then came the choking, the loud sound,
As if long fingers had closed hard
Over a throat.
The wind blew the curtains of rain
Toward us, and away from us.
No one turned to see who it was,
Choking.
It was her time now.
Ours would come later.
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