Of course, it would take this city of impossibility
where iron lace is built into the sky

for me to see how you served other men, let them sit in Dad’s chair
so soon after he died.  How you could step over the bodies

of the grieving to save yourself.  I am now almost the age when you were widowed
and I have tasted the same sour fear, how it rises

like yeast when the house is quiet, a violent summer storm
rocking oak trees strangled in vines, leaves whipped taut, caught in the wind.

I could not yet know these things.

How, at a certain age, it takes so much longer for a face to recover
from sleep, for flesh to seal over a wound.  How loss is like clawing at glass.