the white tissue in the box, her brooding

children when they came to visit,

baptized with their new name

after each kiss. And at night

she whispered it, dark narcotic

in her husband’s ear as he bent

to listen, her hands fumbling

at her buttons, her breasts,

holding them up to the light

like a gift. Venezuela, she said.

Graveyard at Hurd’s Gulch

His grave is strewn with litter again,

crumpled napkins, a plastic spoon, white

styrofoam cup tipped on its side, bright

half-moon of lipstick on the rim.

I want to scold her for the mess she’s left,

the flattened grass and squashed grapes,

but I’ve seen her walking toward the trees,

her hollow body receding, her shadow

following behind. I’m the intruder,

come not to mourn a specific body

but to rest under a tree, my finger tracing

the rows of glowing marble,

the cloud-covered hips of the hills.

I always take the same spot,

next to the sunken stone that says MOTHER,

the carved dates with the little dash between them,

a brief, deep cut, like a metaphor for life.

Does she whisper, I wonder, to the one

she loves, or simply eat and sleep, content

for an hour above the bed of his bones?

I think she brings him oranges and secrets,

her day’s torn and intricate lace.

I have no one on this hill to dine with.

I’m blessed. Everyone I love is still alive.

I know there is no God, no afterlife,

but there is this peace, the granite angel

with moss-covered wings whose face

I have grown to love, her sad smile

like that sadness we feel after sex,

those few delirious hours when we needed nothing

but breath and flesh, after we’ve flown back

into ourselves, our imperfect heavy bodies,

just before the terrible hunger returns.

What We Carry

for Donald

He tells me his mother carries his father’s ashes

on the front seat in a cardboard box, exactly

where she placed them after the funeral.

Her explanation: she hasn’t decided

where they should be scattered.

It’s been three years.

I imagine her driving home from the store,

a sack of groceries jostling next to the box —

smell of lemons, breakfast rolls,

the radio tuned to the news.

He says he never liked his father,

but made peace with him before he died.

That he carries what he can

and discards the rest.

We are sitting in a cafe.

Because I don’t love him, I love

to watch him watch the women walk by

in their sheer summer skirts.

From where I sit I can see them approach,

then study his face as he watches them go.

We are friends. We are both lonely.

I never tell him about my father

so he doesn’t know that when I think of his —

blue ashes in a cardboard box — I think

of my own, alive in a room