For T., who committed suicide. The last poem.
Living nowhere now, you are free
to follow me to every room.
You are free to visit me nights and mornings
and the moment I look skyward for rain
and see instead the pattern of your scarf
wrenching the clouds.
No one,
but you weave your veins into a hundred skins.
In strangers' eyes, I see something
you gave me once,
a secret, a kiss,
the unsure strength
beating in your blue wrist,
a gold ring from your fist.
(And even when I lost that ring, years later,
in an Asian jungle, you were there
among the shrieks of gibbons, the candied skin
of snakes snarled round your neck.)
Nothing solid, only a rawboned ghost catching frogs in my mind.
I meet you under the bridge where all the spirits live
and brown children leaning on the rail
watch your hands touch my face,
carve it hollow, stroke it pale.
Is it your long hair dancing on my neck?
Do your fingers whisper in these sheets?
You are the secret spider
spinning in my corners.
You are the shadow I walk into on waking,
the stain I stumble through each day, clutching
a hurt I cannot cure, sewing up holes
in the ruined sweater, the fraying robe, I close,
reclose memory's broken drawer.
Inside, your photographs grow mythical.
Dear sister, slip away, smoothly, with each year.
Wash down this sharpness, gently flay my fear.
The sculpture of your sere face,
your choker of collarbones,
your keen-edged knees,
these erode.
From an ice-edged bronze
to a supple heart of clay,
spin slowly on the wheel of my mind,
altering, diminishing, turning
to earth in a kinder way.