I remember the stiffness of the living,
the sudden ill fit of our skin,
the too-open eyes of the mourners.
His father sensed
his dead son's life on our clothes,
as if we'd been caught smoking
under the bleachers at school.
I did not see his mother,
or anyone who could have been his mother.
Perhaps she stayed home,
prepared a bed for his absence.
His dead face did not look angelic,
and some said he slept,
but if he slept at all, he did not sleep well.
His cheeks were strangely pink and cottoned.
In the parking lot the leaves fell sideways.
Autumn tattered to a close.
I wished his mother could wake him again,
the crisp morning wildly blue.
His whole life fenced in by ragged vine and wire,
fields laced with ice, fallow and wanting.
