We gathered around the hospital
bed in the crowded apartment,
solemn and hushed, like if we’d waited
and watched the widening crack
of a hatching egg, his shut eyes
round dark yolks, delicate as a baby bird’s.
We circled an inverted cone in the fabric
of Being: his last breath.
You’d scolded your mother the day
before for crying and petting his chest.
“Let him rest,” you tsked. Rest for what?
You should have told her to stretch her grief
from his one bony shoulder to the other
like a blanket. Because grief (whichever
direction you face) comes
always backwards, always an ambush.
Because love is the blueprint
to grief’s concrete foundation.
Because you’re the infinite curve
from which I refuse to escape. Because
the day I first met you
I caught in my teeth the fell thorn
that your death will destroy me.
