To lose someone close to you is to enter an experience no amount of forethought or hindsight can free you from. You must live through grief. You cannot outsmart it, nor think through the fact of someone's being gone, and forever. You must survive the sorrow.

Every pore mourns. Not the brain, nor the chest where bereavement nests, but the body, whole--how it burns. The ache of new bone being grown.

Grief might be easy if there wasn't still such beauty--would be far simpler if the silver maple didn't thrust its leaves into flame,trusting that springwill find it again.

I think it is in grief that we need some reminder of our humanity--and sometimes, someone to say it for us. Poetry steps in at those moments when ordinary words fail: poetry as ceremony, as closure to what cannot be closed.

How I wish I could leave or forget all my dead.

GriefIn the night I brush my teeth with a razor

I am no longer ashamed how for weeks, after, I wanted to be dead--not to die, mind you, or do myself in--but to be there already, walking amongst all those I'd lost, to join the throng singing, if that's what there is-- or the nothing, the gnawing--So be it.

May God or whoever else spare you the arms of bereavement specialists-- grant mercy from the Team dedicated to your transition in this difficult time yet who won't tell you a thing & know far less.

GriefThe borrowed handkerchief where she wept returned to me months later, starched, pressed.