Mirrors Our Minds can Be

Late October graves. Who will tell us how long the dead must hang before their bodies can be claimed. Leaves falling, apples rotting in wet grass. A sudden craving for Christmas decorations, moonlight on snow, the magnetic clarity of brandy, toy trains endlessly running. The Hall of Mirrors our minds can be. How certain of the dead were touched by frost before they could be buried. River notes. Notes to the dead, once elaborately written in crayon, are now hasty I love yous scratched with whatever pen or pencil was at hand. One is never not asking how Emily Dickinson handled this or that interior way station. No wind but a cold like the inside of iron. Tom McGrath poems at the wedding, one of the last times I knew the audience. Crows flying against the wind, high up, their cries a kind of warning. All these languages barely remembered! Going outside at dusk to listen for the river, that moment in darkness when its song is restored to the world.