Punctuation

I still think of you
when my mother shyly insists
not the proud stony ground, not by fire,
but to be eaten by the sea -
to dissolve in the stomachs of winking fish,
to rest and shift like the Titanic
or to be still among scurrying shells.

It is as if your greedy eyes and yellow breath
have come crawling like roots through the dirt
to meet the air, bare and bald.
The whole story comes screaming back.
You had said you'd wait for all this to fall through,
didn't you.

You used to pretend that you would like
some absurd song by some modern band
played at your funeral,
or one dredged up from the minor key
you only ever heard in the inky evenings,
alone, of course.

And I don't think you realized
how soon that would be important,
how soon these decisions must be made.
How your little sister, at once, stopped chirping,
her eyes seeming like black punctuation in quiet skin.
The world suddenly lopsided,
birds drifting to the ground.

We seemed too sloppy and hunched
for the crisp procession that morning,
black leaking from our clothes like a slick mist.
You should have seen us, packed with nose-slime,
each hand gripping tissues, shredded like snow.

So I still think of you,
as long as your bedsheets are full of tears,
as long as the school still worships
everything you ever wrote, drew or sang.

There was no music when we waited outside the church
but your parents would pretend
that the air was full of it.
They stepped and twitched like cats
and filled with silence
as you were carried past them.