For Chase

poetry

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For Chase

All that day the cold rains fall. Faces wheel.
All that day you’ve been gone so long now
and I still can’t quite believe it.

I look at the fishscale sky and can’t believe it.
The atoms of your last breath, I know,
yet infuse this quivering air; your blood 
has evaporated into the rain of the atmosphere 
and the salt of your bones returned to the sea;
every cell of your body has been 
transfigured, 
alchemized—
not a single iridescent neuron wasted—
and still you’re gone.

From the floor of the market where I work
I stare out at the moving clouds.
Costumed in a smile, I stand at a cash register
besieged by glints of memory, jarring,
like the sting in your hands that first time
you really crack a baseball with a wooden bat—
only all through you, all through,
and you pass through your day
gazing at the shivering world,
so many faces bobbing by
like balloons with painted-on expressions,
painted clothes,
scripted mannerisms,
inane and grinning minds:
	“You look bored!”
	“You look like you need something to do!”
	“Have you been waiting for me?”
Har har, and you smile and still your friend is gone,
reaching for the cart anyway because
this woman standing across from you,
with her scarlet mouth and harlequin eyes,
doesn’t care—
so you ask her about her day as 
she hands you an old paper sack
and says:
	“I brought my own bags.”

This poem is a part of a shared world. Others in the series include:

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