Walk with me for a while until fire burns the last angel and wings wither until it is almost impossible to remember, then we must remember with flowers and stones and talk as if it were possible to be heard by others besides oneself. The ground dampens against the palms of my hands. I do not know what tender things to believe. I am alone with flowers and grief. Down the row someone else stands with his head bowed. I miss whom he misses. I miss those I did not know. I miss where my heart used to be. My flowers are the only blue flowers they stand with some discomfort in the cup provided. Once on an older grave I placed a rose to keep someone warm under a cold stone. The grass watered into wildflowers that look like daisies but aren’t I pick some and give them away to graves while trying not to think of bodies, feeling souls all around silent as a choir of strangers come together for one purpose: to be sent down deeply away from sunlight in a new dark, we will see a new dark but do not tell me where you will be burned and scattered.
CAROL ELLIS was born in Detroit, Michigan. She has her Ph. D. in English from the University of Iowa. Her latest publications are in Zyzzva and San Pedro River Review, and she has completed a new manuscript of poems. She lives under protest in the Central Valley of California.
