PanegyricGrant me a single little moment of private, personal tribute on this - her would-be-seventeenth-birthday. I've made it as small as possible.
My darling
dead girl - I will not ever
commit you to the tomb
of the past and must always dance
around the verbs
tensely, careful not to knock
into finality with the ending
ed anything as lovely as
live. She does
and will but never did
- oh the clipping of perpetuity
that past tense curse,
is withers to was
and now crumbles to then
but her, her remembered cry
from a room down the hall
or the single weight
of a footstep's echo
can shatter time into as many fragments
as there are days.
Define gone as a different way
of being here and
there is presence in the hollow lack
of the present, she of green eyes and white
my dead
is proof of passed, dust in a box
and my fingers won't again feel
her back, little legs, teeth;
eyes won't rest
on a blur of soft each morning,
even my nose sniffs loss's scent.
Taste and touch, sigh, sound.
Each of the body's clumsy senses
commonly unfurl, vanish -
but my words can
with an invisible hand find her:
Dear, I will not ever
entomb you in the past tense
darling girl.
