Two Years After You
Committed Suicide
Your rooted family
came together and planted a river birch
down the lane by my mailbox shaped
like a monument. When the wind blows,
tentative branches tremble. On visiting,
siblings are greeted by a red bandanna
blazing like a red sun hanging on a bony arm
of a stripped tree. Memories then flood them.
None flinch, but none outrun the years.
Your rooted family
takes the time in the evening hours
to unreel the hippie days, to relive the effect
of your hearty laugh, how you’d drink sunlight,
and we smile at the way you could ripple
any conversation. And yet, we also recall
the long night of weeping
after you’d filled yourself with bullets—
first, from a medicine bottle
and then, from an innocent gun.
Your rooted family,
as you know, is no stranger to storms
or picking up broken limbs after weather passes,
but now some of us carry fear in our hearts
that a child’s child may one day
startle us once again
by crashing to the ground
and uprooting an entire tree,
by leaving us just as you did
shriveling everything.
Committed Suicide
Your rooted family
came together and planted a river birch
down the lane by my mailbox shaped
like a monument. When the wind blows,
tentative branches tremble. On visiting,
siblings are greeted by a red bandanna
blazing like a red sun hanging on a bony arm
of a stripped tree. Memories then flood them.
None flinch, but none outrun the years.
Your rooted family
takes the time in the evening hours
to unreel the hippie days, to relive the effect
of your hearty laugh, how you’d drink sunlight,
and we smile at the way you could ripple
any conversation. And yet, we also recall
the long night of weeping
after you’d filled yourself with bullets—
first, from a medicine bottle
and then, from an innocent gun.
Your rooted family,
as you know, is no stranger to storms
or picking up broken limbs after weather passes,
but now some of us carry fear in our hearts
that a child’s child may one day
startle us once again
by crashing to the ground
and uprooting an entire tree,
by leaving us just as you did
shriveling everything.