I carried death inside me for several days, waiting
That man had no ticket to the concert; he pressed his ear to the wall,
but no song found him
Bees were swarming; they made sleeves and a hood around me when I stood still
All winter a deep booming as black ice shifted on the lake, cracking into continents
I tried to invent a new shape for snowflakes
I tried to make them last, but one by one they burned out on my pink palm
The way the children propped him up, the field mouse they found, put a berry
beneath his paws. The way the boy pushed a small sock into a box, painted a mountain scene for the beady fixed eye to see. They gave him a pebble of cheese, a soda bottle cap for water
The creek rushed by with no concern nor time for us to stop
There was pain but it was hard to describe
Newsprint-ash settled across my hair and after, how tongues leapt around the torso
of the tree, and when it cracked, riven, there was a soft pulpiness within, amber-red and everything trapped, suddenly exposed, trembled to find a way out from the flames
Spittle bugs bubbled on the surface. We slipped our way back across the fallen trunk
to the other side, the stink of swamp-muck thick
I sent the self out like a dog, but she returned unmet, unheard
Please, they said, the children not wanting me to die. Please, Not wanting me
even to be old
This bubble, this bubble
They scooped it from the moving water, and though it was dead already, they tried to keep it
from ending