Grief Lessons

No one stole your money.

No one stole your whole heart

then climbed into a stolen plane

and stole away into the night

to disappear entirely, stealing

darkness itself, then dawn.

What name would you even call

into the shadows between

here and gone, yours and no one’s,

what color could you give it,

this shade of something

slightly less than life?

Better to leave it whole.

Pure death—like an unmined diamond.

Keep the light of the fire

away from it—clean, untempered

by the tedious heat of language—

safe from your magpie, morbid way

of turning and turning

your pain in your hands

until you’ve crushed it to dust.

And anyway, who are you to say

I lost the world? No one. To admit

that you held the world at all?