March

by David Cope

white dawnlight thru my windows, thru fronds of cycad & spathphylum fierce light after months of storm & sigh, turning from death to death

now foreclosures gruff men once hipsters or marines hair trimmed back after thirty years, pushing mowers snowblowers shooting hoops with kids

thin women with long hair & hard wise eyes, tough women at the mailbox, all gone after long decades, houses gone dark, curtainless windows, empty

driveway fat cats disappear with millions after shanking the economy, thousands tramping streets, fruitless, families coming apart nowhere to go.

after painting ceiling where roof leak burst thru last summer, I sit alone silently & listen, tender moments passing, ephemeral yet precious after

so much death & sorrow. In my dream, we scatter roses on the river in July where last year we spread our mother’s ashes, just upstream from her old

bedroom, near moraine bank where I once risked all to save a  drowning dog, clambering across ice & falling in myself, later feted on evening news

the procession of the dead, everyday dia de muertos, mother father mentor brother father of a friend now racing thru my brains, their fragile memory

all that remains easily scattered, lost, erased to all in deadline & routine: thus this fierce light thru fronds raising my eye to this day, this touch.

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