When I Return to Your Death As a Poet

for John, ten years late

When my daughter rushes into the living room,

cheeks flushed from her wicked siblings who spring from closets

and unlit hallways, all the fear in the world blotched upon her

small round face, I pretend sometimes that her body is being driven by you,

that you have discovered a temporary passage between heaven and bone,

and when I speak to her, I am really speaking to you,

and I know we haven't much time—

my daughter is young and must return to herself.

So I speak urgently, each word a tiny grain of sand, spilling.

It won't be long before she learns to repeat our conversations,

breaking the privacy, the awkward third lover. Already she

practices whispering into her hands, stands too long

in an empty room, stares through her father at the dinner table.

Each new year I feel the mud thickening beneath my feet.

One morning she will wake up too old to remember any of this,

delivering us to your second death. I am sure I will know it

the moment it happens. The first time she comes home a few hours late,

enters the house a woman I do not recognize.