Those Parts of Them that Cannot Stay

Those parts of them

that cannot stay – the way
the structure of her face
gave way: exquisitely
in place – bruised

in the bloody fall she took
a month before she died:
her inerasably black-eyed
and swollen flesh
the bane of mortuary art:

impossible to take
what life, not only death,
had wrenched apart
and put it back into
a simulacrum of a woman.

Somewhere in memory
the glimmering inimitable
and unsullied traces
of the presences
not only of my mother

but of every other absent
essence I have known
of human soul
hang strange – and soft –
aloft and whole.







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