I understood your allergies to ivory,
anything close to white. Perhaps it was
a form to sign inside the morgue.
Vivid frost of lonely winters
after cancer shook the house,
left you only furniture
and pitch black night
without much velvet in its grain.
The livid shade of feckless hope,
of failure knocking at the door.
The color was that pat, that clean.
Death is the ultimate bleach.
The parking lot had memories
of times your shoes kicked a tire,
then returned to dust a shelf of china cups
that rattled in an avalanche.
“I’ll call you on the phone,” you said,
“but I can’t walk the ghostly halls.”
I understood the jail rails of steel beds
and gurneys that carry a world away —
then lie and do not bring it back.
That room with little on the walls but
voiding charts and memos to a passing nurse
who had no answers in her hand
but gentle ways to close the book
as raison d’être lost its glue.
I would have picked the dye myself.
Every lily told a tale
of love as poisoned manuscripts.
Anything in dirty chalk
was just too close to missing angels,
open graves, and pale moans.
*First Published in Epiphany
