What they see by the light of candles

I was the old woman
visible to neighbours
only in conversations
on front porches
at the ends of driveways
glancing back to my darkened house
where I watched them from windows

onto the world, unseen because you can’t see inside
when the lights are out

they wonder when there is no garbage
on Sunday night
nor on Monday morning when the trucks pass by
they ask if I’m alive in here
or so I imagine

I’ll be found one day
when someone follows a nose
to the body, disintegration
escaping cracks in the mortar

when they find me, they’ll understand
something about garbage
the heap beside my unmade bed
the heap on the dining room table
shit overflowing the litter box
electricity shut off months before
those unopened envelopes in my mailbox

I know what they’ll ask
when the money is found
under the mattress
no one wants to touch
defeat
how you can’t stop someone
intent on not meeting the neighbours
under any light but that cast by candles

waving shadows on the bedroom wall

eap

Happy with little and still

her eyes are cloudy
the cataracts
she won’t have removed
because of the scalpel

the children
won’t understand
there can be no knives
in this life now

light has moved
from the eye to her face
happy with little
and still, living there

the laughter of her children’s children
rises over the lake
and she catches
the father of each in the flame

of memory, every bright hair of them
gleaming in the sun

eap

Late Fragment

And did you get what
you wanted from this life, even so?
I did.
And what did you want?
To call myself beloved, to feel myself
beloved on the earth.

Raymond Carver

Although we know that after such a loss the acute state of mourning will subside, we also know we shall remain inconsolable and will never find a substitute. No matter what may fill the gap, even if it be filled completely, it nevertheless remains something else. And actually this is how it should be. It is the only way of perpetuating the love which we do not want to relinquish.

S. Freud