This is it, I think, the last walk to your door

and I pass ravens and horses and geese,

bears and fairies, tidy bright beings

that crowd the hedges waiting to be seen.

They are what you made them, vivid, simple,

creatures rendered of rocks, wood or plastic,

guardians of your ingenuity, vivacity.

Recycled bits and pieces that shone under your hand.

They mark your presence on the way to the house

soon to be emptied as you are moved elsewhere

 

from this place which gleams in light flowing from a

brittle blue sky, beauty a taunt and a poultice. 

It may be the last time I climb this rise in the land

to see you. I mean you, the one I’ve known all my life,

not the one you are becoming with your odd shyness

and vibration of fear and fatal gaps in conversation

memories loose and tangled like threads beneath

the great tapestry of your industrious, iridescent life.

 

I climb the five sienna red steps. You come after a

moment so long that I am deafened by 

sirens screaming toward some far-off disaster,

and clouds converge and bunch, then race over city

center until blueness has gone slate and I sense

the stealth fire invading our territory.

I am trying, pulling you closer as you blur 

like there are veils of smoke that have swallowed us

 

but I cannot save you. So I cross into your

netherworld, one sister welcoming another

with our arms still mighty and weighted with love,

heavy and sound like the heart of stone

you painted for me so long ago