CASSIDY MCFADZEAN

As if plucked



from the earth, a cluster
	
of pale white flowers,

the suddenness of your absence.
	
You said you hoped the cat 

would outlive you, a remark

made offhand that challenged 

my sense of logic. At the time,

I couldn’t parse it. Asked you

to explain. We left it unanswered,

hanging between us like ellipses,

a final message that never came.

Lately, I want to believe

you intuited you were dying,

but protected us from the signs.

When, as a girl, the stem I picked

blackened, its leaves of wax

turning to ash in my herbarium,

you took me in your arms, 

telling me death would come

but not for a very, very, very,

very long time.

The corners of existence begin to peel away



Is there anything on the other side?

the childish wish that at the end of whatever this is 

I’ll see you again one day.

My father said: Forever is a long time.

It feels subjective, simultaneous,

the expansion of the universe, its eventual end,

gravity moving us in imperceptible ways.

It’s the specificity of our relationship I miss,

memories flattened to universality,

energy given over to entropy, 

that even trees have a heartbeat,

water pulsing through their branches.

How I cried at the hundred horse chestnut

growing at the side of Mount Etna for 1000 years.

How can you be everywhere and nowhere?

It’s the particulars of being here I’ll mourn:

the cooing of pigeons outside the window,

the sun reaching through the glass.