Coming on two years, it’s like driving down

a hill, past the cut lawns and little dogs

and the names you had for them.

I’ve been happy, moving fast

and talking TV and pet peeves

to keep others at bay. Honesty means slowing.

Mowing the grass. I do it over the sink,

cutting my bangs or dumping another bad bottle,

these little resets when your song comes on

or when friends from too long ago send their best,

and I realize I remember you via photograph.

Painterly jeans and soft L. L. Bean shirts.

Wiry glasses that would sell now on Etsy. 

And the downhill drive, the stubble and chewtoys,

pinch my throat with photo-moments

made vague by fingerprints.

Contamination of evidence,

or filial erasure? 

Failure, it feels like, ashes in the air

that will darken us all. They don’t tell you,

as you slave for a legacy—they don’t admit—

that they don’t want to remember you. They want your spot

for a Tee-ball field. The dumptruck idled

across the street while you were a sad case

on a scooter at Roche Bros.,

flailing for peaches a shelf too high, thinking:

---

let the cans avalanche. Soup and tunafish,

knock me to a pulp for the teens to mop

and dump over the loading dock. I’m

too old to care for a funeral wreath. 

My friends died with hair left and motor control.

I’ve seen them to urns, unsure that I lived,

muttering it’ll me next, it’s only fair, 

while the lilies and kirk grass

made the day good enough,

a good day to die.

I’ve outlived that myth-man by too many years,

too many chairs.

---

It’s what all of us wanted, would never admit,

and fear for ourselves—until we pass through the eye

of middle age and smell the ash in our hair.