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I always thought death would be like traveling in a car, moving through the desert, the earth a little darker than sky at the horizon, that your life would settle like the end of a day and you would think of everyone you ever met, that you would be the invisible passenger, quiet in the car, moving through the night, forever, with the beautiful thought of home.
Copyright © 2011 by Carl Adamshick. Used with permission of the author.
I came home
from my mother’s funeral
to a house of my own making
to dust I didn’t want
to lift from a shelf
I came home astonished
by life being the same
struck dumb
when the knife
sunk into the melon.
I live between the bus stop
and something I can’t explain,
between the night sounding
with green leaves and a few
visible stars, between a horse
and philosophy wondering
if it is a great clenched fist
that keeps me from my life.
Now I live between my mother’s
death and my own. I close
my eyes and see a different
darkness. Under the trees
wind falls through my hair.
You were a place, Mother.
I’ve always wanted to be a place,
a destination with a park bench.
I’m afraid I’m only the weather.
If you are anything like I am
and I have faith that you are
then you have already stepped
out of your body
and been irrevocably wounded
I was born in 1969
Chances are you were born
during a different year
It doesn’t matter if you were born
three thousand years ago
or if you are born
three thousand years from now
we share what it means to live
Maybe you have gone
back into your body
and found words
the only guide
into the known dark