My field is covered in stones. The earth is parched here
and flowers will not bloom.
It was only me and him that wordless summer. We tasted the grapes from the arbors,
watched the heavy globes ripening sungolden, nearly sweet.
In the evening, my father and I ate sunwarmed tomatoes right from the garden
held like apples in our hands, while his father’s peonies swung low, heavy with bees,
to kiss the cool earth. We’d been digging stones from the field all day
and clearing brush from the woods to burn under the rose soft August sky.
At night, I burned marshmallows fat as the moon while he burned pages of his novels,
all the stories lost. Ashes on fire
twirled in the dark, turned into fireflies, into stars,
some of them falling
back to his earth.
It was a different world then, after they died, in a summer silent like the burning sun,
and I fell asleep alone in the grass feeling the wide earth turn under the stars.
I’d like to remember whose eyes they have, to know
who they would have grown up to be, to know
how it would feel
for my tongue to say:
This is my brother,
This is my sister; to know
how would it feel
for a holiday to come where I could invite them in, to have
a home in them, in us;
how would it feel
for my heart to know
this bond, to beat unbroken here?
I’m left with many stones to tend, here alone
where the earth is parched and flowers will not bloom.
All the other holes in my earth may be larger but never greater;
two of my graves are too small, sister, brother,
too small to hold as vast a thing as death, too small to hold
the after,
to tell
of the terrible space of left behind.
