Back home again. Branches peer through twisted optics: leaves preserved in rain gone stone…
Back home
again. Branches peer through
twisted optics:
leaves preserved in
rain gone stone.
An ice storm veiled the world last night.
Greater powers blocked my path.
I tried.
She died sometime in the night,
they tell me,
but nobody knows the time.
Small town southern nurses
had never seen such ice before outside of
kitchen iceboxes and basement freezers.
They tell me that too.
There's murder in those sidewalks.
They tell that to each other.
I guess some sort of veiled dare.
It was the storm that did the deed.
A shot
could have saved her
had the crystalline scene not called the nurse away.
So I'm to blame nature, I suppose.
Death: just waiting for the mother's cue to pounce.
I laugh at the excuse.
I guess I'll sue the Earth for malpractice.
Maybe the moon for affecting tides.
Or maybe I'll just return
without her
to her smell, her style,
her skivvies on the floor,
to all those memories mingled with ice,
in some tight stasis
that blurs the light
through the lens
between the leaves.