Elegy Before Death

It’s hard to remember and strange comfort:
when you’re gone, truly gone,
you won’t miss us at all. You won’t miss
anything. The dog’s soft jowl. Tomato pie.
A summer night’s slide into clean sheets,
that cold bliss to the feet. None of it.

My aunt, in touch with a medium
after the death of my other aunt—
she claims that her sound system
lit up with static chaos on election night.
That was Lisa—pissed about Trump.

And we shrug and nod; everyone grieves
in their own way. Believe what you need
to believe. See your loved ones in
cardinals, and hummingbirds, and hawks,
that flash of wing or song somehow
proof that they haven’t gone
after all.

But really— can you think
of anything worse for the dead?
Still concerned with that turkey
from beyond the grave? Still going off
about the everyday shit of living?

I hope you miss nothing.
Go, and do not come back.
Go, and be whatever you will be,
utterly apart from us.

A spray of galaxy debris, unfurling.
Matter disintegrated like glitter
on the floor of a distant planet’s
raging sea.

*

How terrible to bear it

The possibility that it could all be okay.
Sure, an illusion. Smoke puff, fog

blanketing the glass top of a lake
while creatures still shudder terribly

under the surface. Everything is subjective,
including hope. Especially hope.

But— it felt real, too.
Something you might tease out of the skin

and examine under dawn’s natural light.
Drag it outside to see all its flaws,

the wrinkles and puckers; the sun-freckled
arm of a hard-earned life. The stub of a leg.

A cane, tap tap tapping. A breath. A goodbye.

*

Anna Lowe Weber, originally from Louisiana, lives in Huntsville, Alabama, where she teaches at the University of Alabama in Huntsville. Her poetry and fiction has been published in the Iowa Review, South Carolina Review, Gargoyle, Tar River Poetry, and the Idaho Review, among other journals.