Passage

i died in a car crash

two days ago was unrecognizable

when they pulled me from the gears

no one's fault, no one's bottle

no one's teenage pride or throttle

our innocence is all the worse for fears

the other walked away alive

arms wrapped now around his wife

my lover sits, the silent eye

in a hurricane of warmth and word

my mother trembles with the sobs

whose absence seems absurd

my sister shouts to let her see

through the cloud of crowd surrounding me

my colleagues call for silence in my name

i died in a car crash three months ago

they burned me until i glowed

and crumbled to a fine gray sand

now i am nothing, everywhere

several breaths of strangers' air

and all thoughts ever written in my hand

they plant my tree out in the yard

it grows but takes the winter hard

my lover holds a knife to wrist

says tomorrow comes, hold on a while

my mother tosses in the sheets

and dreams me holding my own child

my sister plays our homemade tapes

laughs as tears run down her face

my office door now wears a different name

i died in a car crash four years ago

my tree drinks melted snow

just eight feet tall a pale and fragile thing

bee stings beaches bright vacations

sunburnt high-school graduations

a sparrow healing from a broken wing

this year a glimpse of second chances

tiny apples on my tree's branches

my lover hears the open wind

and crawls blinking into the sun

my mother leafs through photographs

and thinks "yes she was a lovely one"

my sister can't decide her truth

asks aloud what i might do

in a conference hall my brief efforts engraved

a lifetime ago it seems

a decade or two or three

they've come out with a new design

bars and bags front and behind

my fate now an impossibility

safely packaged hurtling down

the highway hardly make a sound

my lover very much alive