Estate

a great afternoon for going gently into the good papers: where all the named but ignored quit quietly from the earth. a passing breath that, like all the others, had one before it unique for having none come after. and that is all. just exhalation and leave. no closing curtain, clash of thunder and drama, her last words simply asking for water some few hours before; and any after that go unrecorded.

a great old lady, but hardly grand. her sheets were bought last year and the bedside lamp had been in the house when she moved in. her iconography was all pans and pantries. a two-decade gone husband and a journalist son somewhere in the north of iran. he received notice one month later, but the property had already been settled, he had a few items waiting in storage, but there was certainly no need for him to come home. the grave plot had been arranged and paid for six years beforehand, it was just a few hundred yards from the new highway exchange but the sound of traffic hardly ever invaded; in fact most of the cemetery was quiet and pleasant.

a great mystery indeed. how can a face and a name and a sentence affect me? anyone may be given a backstory and meaning, any word rendered sacred by repeating it in the dark as thoughts of god and heaven and death and sex go parading about, shooting down the inner eye and old radio love songs from 9th grade are chiseling away at the berlin wall we have in our stomach, that keeps us from weeping for days at the barely noticeable death of a great old lady, who died with the same humility that let her slip thru our lives without ever recognizing humankind when we saw her at the grocery store,

loading her own milk into the back of a red mercury