Someone forgot to whisper your death to the bees
And so all the bees have left
And the fruit trees have died.

In the house there are twelve ghosts 
And all of them you—
Caught like birds in the stations of girlhood.

One ghost kneels before an empty fireplace;
She sings her sister’s name
Into the cool mouth of the chimney,

Listens as the voice shivers
Its return.

A barefoot ghost pitches stones 
Down the red dirt road.

The melancholy sister at the kitchen window
Waits for a letter, watches for the postman.

Twelve ghosts. Each sister ties
A different color ribbon in her hair.

One sweeps all the rooms of the house.

Two stand before the mirror. But it’s bad luck
For two to look into a mirror at the same time;
The youngest will die.

And what of the one in the basement?

No, we don’t visit her.

Twelve white plates laid on the table for supper.

All twelve drink water from one well.

Each daughter moves in the mood of her own month.
They carry the tides, the seasons, the year of you.
Each daughter, each dancer,
Delivers the message of you.

One dreams she’s a racehorse rider—
She straddles the propane tank in the yard 
And rides recklessly into the night.

One ghost plays a nocturne on the piano,

While another skips into the room,
Strikes the discordant keys, and vanishes.

The last ghost leans with her ear against a dead wasp nest. 
She closes her eyes and listens

To you, still singing 
Beyond the kingdom of the living

The yellow flowers on the grave
make an arch, they lie 

on a black stone that lies on the ground
like a black door that will always

remain closed down into the earth,
into it is etched the name

of a great poet who believed
he had nothing more to say,

he threw himself into literal water
and everyone has done their mourning 

and been mourned over, and we all 
went on with our shopping, 

I stare at this photograph of that grave
and think you died like him, 

like all the others,
and the yellow flowers 

seem angry, they seem to want to refuse 
to be placed anywhere but in a vase 

next to the living, someday 
all of us will have our names 

etched where we cannot read them,
she who sealed her envelopes

full of poems about doubt with flowers 
called it her “granite lip,” I want mine 

to say Lucky Life, and what would 
a perfect elegy do? place the flowers 

back in the ground? take me 
where I can watch him sit eternally 

dreaming over his typewriter? 
then, at last, will I finally unlearn 

everything? and I admit that yes, 
while I could never leave 

everyone, here at last 
I understand these yellow flowers, 

the names, the black door 
he held open 

and you walked through.