She vanished in the shadows
of a mid-March Sunday’s moon.
When I first heard the news
an orange leapt from its bough.
There were bees in the flowerbed.
Grass shattered under my feet;
the smell of soot and ash
clung lightly to the breeze;
her smile fell
from a Hong Kong orchid
off Market Street.

The news first came
dead-ended and one-way.
Eight years’ reflection on that day
have hoped it was a turn in life:
the harrowing left onto Texas
from Mulberry Drive –
the high-branch’s snap
in the old, ragged pine –
when I was lost
in an Irish poet’s mind.

Hearing her voice, years since passed,
among this phone’s old messages,
I hear myself the day I heard the news –
Christianity’s eternity
became eternally confused.

Her long, black-curtain-hair,
the books piled at her feet,
the way philosophy
rolled off of her physique…

All I hear now when I think of that day
is the frail rattle of

a noose’s sway: pebbles beneath the midnight train.

April 2012