We lose
even our loss.

At the funeral of a young woman aged 25,
death is everywhere.
We walk past the small house of her coffin
lay a single white carnation
by her photograph
and feel alone again,
an aloneness that is a curtaining of the self,
when the lights go out in the house
and the fire stills.

I touch the back of the young woman's mother
and hold her long in my arms.
When I let her go, she bends double,
shakes her head, needing to stiffen
against the loneliness that follows holding.
Only the body knows,
the back that bends double,
the head that turns slowly, so slowly
and nothing changes.
A cry escapes her mouth, but only
for a second. She swallows the sound again.

Afterward, at home, I switch on all the lights
and make a fire
and drink tea, sweet and hot,
and fall asleep with the logs yellow against my back.
I wake to cold
and feel the ceasing again,
and the bleeding of colour into darkness.
A photograph makes its offering of one instant,
but in it hovers the instant just before.
In the photograph, the young woman looks
as though a smile has just faded from her face.

In the morning a bird flies overhead.
Its shadow touches the ground,
the house across the way, the flowers.