To All Appearances A Lady - University of British Columbia

4
Your lovely acolytes, light
and dark, wish you farewell
into sunlight. Which
is also fire.
"Still, words
between the dead and the living
are difficult."
Also between
the living and the dead, between
the charmed disorder of our days
and the blank purity of yours.
5
And now. You are inveterate.
You insist on being dead,
day after absent day.
6
A month later we drove
through the green world-garden
of new leaves and luminous rain
to Roblin Lake. You were not there
(or were you?) as we talked
about you and your ways,
stood where you often stood.
Outside the windows, the familiar trees,
high and vegetable, perfect
by the water, here where you were happy,
at ease with beer and gossip and poems
after twenty-odd years of arrivals,
where your voice grew, sang.
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