....sunday....

what do you want to talk about?
do you want
to talk about how that life then
holds sadness now
as a cup holds anything,
collecting things that can't be discarded:

a room, a time, a feeling like laying in
the summer night grass stargazing or
seeing the fourth-of-July fireworks or

your novel, hardbound now
as our past.

remember us minting
gingerbread villages
peopled by happy winter dwellers,
but can you recall
it exactly?

what choice did any of us have
following that map

as we now follow yours.
the charge belongs to you and
you alone because your woman of
thirty-five years
is dead and gone,
the pasture has been plowed,
the horses long gone,
the kids' dog buried in the woods.

let us not talk about
the inevitable ways in which

decline is palpable, cup overturned,

fairy-tale of eternity

finally cross examined.