I don’t know why this heavy sense of severance on a snowy evening when earth stutters into its own purposeful quietude of falling flakes of flake-filling streets of yards and roofs and motionless cars full of flakes I say to the flakes coming down Are You The Dead? There is no reply
snow
There is only further snowing as the flakes come taking their place at the table of noticeable accumulation landing anywhere landing as definitive transformations hand the hours of spring into the hours of snow that tomorrow will drift like this passage formed through shadows of fractioned moonlight fallen and freed of names
decorated
“Look at my teeth!” he said and smiled in his fifties having finally gone for dental repairs and gum treatment he was so proud his fixed teeth and cleansed gums so proud he’d joke and call them gooms and feign a smile like the Cheshire Cat— he was always good at that so he’d do it again—smile like the Cheshire Cat and he would settle into flossing between all the hard to get at places between the teeth and psyche settling in as one settles in marriage as one settles toward retirement except little did anyone know he was heading out his cells prepping his body to be prepared to settle fixed teeth and all readied in his best tan suit, his wedding ring his gold band with black onyx stone even his tri-focals over his glued shut eyes the glasses I bumped when I kissed him goodbye like I kiss all my dead releasing Goodbye in cheeky kisses where they lie coffined in wait among the many guests expressing to family the grief the joy the disbelief and we could not see his beautiful teeth the day they laid him down we couldn’t even see them before the funeral played itself out we couldn’t see them even when he lay wide-eyed and open-mouthed escaped one might say from the vessel of disease called body that remains from which we couldn’t even see the beautiful teeth of so few years before he vanished into transformation and they boxed him up for the Fort Snelling grave —2005
LEIGH HERRICK ~
80
~