For Louisa

We could not keep one minute’s silence for you –
footsteps came and went in the hall outside,
doors banged and banged – but that’s as it should be.
You’re as anonymous as you chose,
hunched alone in the dark of your roadside motel
three thousand miles and fourty-nine years from home, your parents’
names and numbers printed neatly on a post-it beside the phone.
We’ve all thought of that. And no note, because what words
are there to take back the violence of being here,
the grosser stain of leaving.
Oh, we’re all so sorry – our apologies needle the empty air,
all vying to be the last word – that is not what I meant to say,
this is not what I meant to be, this is not what I meant –
each adding its small pebble of sorrow to the weight of everything
that can’t be taken back. You got what you wanted –
your silence, your oblivion – now keep it to yourself. Carry it alone
along with accident of your birth, and all the smaller
deaths against which you learned, little by little,
not to cry out, not to be there
bent under the whims of pricking rain and throbbing sun
your voice already mingled with the earth
tamped under your feet – these things,
along with the best of our hopes, take with you as you go
back among the unborn.
Tell them life is a strange blessing, full of wind and light
and uncountable wildflowers – and love, yes, that too,
no less for the fact that it was never
enough to go around.
That there were blows – but we were already old,
and long ago and far away before they landed.
Tell them we tried to leave the earth
as we found it, that for all our failure
there is still space for them.
If our mouths open, even now, against the debt we deepen
with each denial – if we drift, still, in sleep, to embrace
that solitary consolation we know too well
we cannot afford, we will try to hold our peace for the ones
who will come in our stead, never knowing our names
or our unwilling trace on the earth that keeps
each ancient, long-buried blow – perhaps they will forgive us.