The candle sweats between us.
The psychic names the dead I once loved
as if reading anonymous obituaries.
My high school friend Joe who often won
the 400 in the track meet
after a night of partying —
flung like a rag from the Volkswagen Bug
outside Cle Elum now paces
the seam between worlds,
denting every locked door,
thinking if he can only get in
he’ll be back with the living.
Outside her window a willow
leans without complaint,
lichen freckling the stones below it.
I wish I had her confidence.
My friend’s brother-in-law Jimmy
collapsed face down
on the blue racquetball court,
heart jammed shut mid-game.
He waits in the hallway of his own house
among the weight of shadows,
the cold slipstream when his wife passes,
the smell of his son’s sleep through a cracked door.
He keeps asking the same question—
How can they go on?
My sister Michelle memorized the curves
and cuts of her neighborhood streets
and a mile from home fell asleep
at the wheel. Her Honda Civic
dug into a terraced lawn,
her neck breaking like a chicken bone.
All these years later she still
refuses another body.
Says once was enough
with the drape of human feeling
too hard to bear.
I think of grass,
how it bends with wind
and doesn’t argue,
how rocks accept their stains.
The psychic tells me about her own brother
Michael, taken by cancer, and how
he still craves the drag of a good smoke.
He drifts beside strangers on a break
outside an oil-stained factory,
opens his mouth, hoping for
the soft violence on his tongue again.
Unfair, the psychic says.
No bright ascension.
Lives still stuck,
shackled by the envy
of those who depart cleanly.
