Vikki C.

You leave me in Kensington cemetery

to ask all the questions alone.

Say the graves & headstones are art too.

Their placement an extension of my life.

Walking through, armed with flowers

deciding whom to give them to, who to forget.

Who among those beneath cool grass

would you choose to speak to about loss?

All these beings now interred, loved too.

Had fond names in their once beating hearts,

obsessions of sex in their grave minds.

As if my steady gait would rouse a mother

or father to remind me of my name.

Tell me to take my time on the other side.

To learn languages beyond a prison.

To be tender: to hold the hands of another

as if they were beech leaves soon to jewel

this dark soil, mistaken as our last home.

Hands that have known lifetimes of labour

carrying births — then — deaths in caskets.

And you are there too of course, a vesper.

Your body too illuminated for a burial.

We talked long about such shifts towards, & away.

Never forgetting our hands. How yours slipped

beyond what could be held easily on Earth.

In their loose grip, a bouquet you’d prepared

in case I failed at all this too. You said white

& red suited the spill of my dark hair.

Hair that would continue growing after the end.

You’d lay the flowers at my side. Make arrangements:

my head, these blooms, your hands.

My hands, these thorns, your open shirt.

I don’t know the most memorable way to do this.

Nor why I carry petals in October when there

should only be debris. To whom do I credit

the exit music? Which instrument accompanies me?