I received the news, this time exactly:
Nine-thirty-two in the evening.
A Saturday, the tenth of April.

Listen carefully:
run beside the surf, but know
the ocean is not your friend.
There is no smile in the way the waves
drown swimmers, the way they founder
mighty ships and save the sum of our loss
at the bottom, buried with the silt.
But could you so quickly hate the ocean?

Pain grooms itself, wants to be known
unsolicited, wants to steal away,
wants to bury its cold hands,
wants to wail but also to hush,
to quietly bristle in a bed of tar.
To wipe its face clean. To
seek love, and then to forsake it.

I cannot calm it - could never calm it.
I have no balm to blunt it.
We stem our grief as easily as blood from a wound -
hold your arm where the shell cut it,
on those sharp sands, and nurse it 'til it ends.