Today's poem is by Carol Alexander

Sirius
       

Dogs adapt. Dry-eyed like smaller fountains. From the fourteenth floor
ginkgo sheds a necropolis scent. The dogs once tread bracken and ice.
Maggie whines at the ward's chemical smell staining your skin, my dear,
vomiting a pill for nerves. Sallow as ginkgo fruit or pale urine, that skin
your shorn black hair an imago. Soup cringes on the stove. Matchstick fingers
pinch a hard light. I could ask how it feels to be pricked and peeled
until your own pack snarls, Judas and Pilate with tails. Heart fern chills
on the windowsill. You can't see past the clustering leaves to their roots
or speechless pulse. After the funeral, the animals will stray from the hearth
to the crucified tree still plummy with glass balls. Neither will live the year out
but on the egg-and-dart lintels of the mantelpiece. A special star beribboned.
The poems you wrote on the verge of being late. That I folded into fans.
Your DNA all apology. The drinking had stopped. The smoking too.
Today I read how cancer cleaves to cells, knowing it loves me too.
Your heater-less Ford from which we bled like two stags on fresh snow.

Copyright © 2024 Carol Alexander All rights reserved
from Blue Vivarium
Glass Lyre Press
Reprinted by Verse Daily® with permission