April Requiem

When I come to visit you
and talk like we used to,
I read your little stone plaque again, thinking how
those first days, in the black hollow of the earth
and January wind-chill blanching mourners’ faces,
disintegration’s certainty seemed to me
at least conceivable.
Yet I know now, when the breeze is warm,
and the sun hangs drowsy in the branches
of new saplings, and the whole field has sprouted
pinwheels and chrysanthemums,
that, beating down with my fists
on that fresh green barrier, I’d find beneath
not bone and dust of former flesh,
but you sleeping, pink-cheeked
and more whole than in life.

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