PENN KEMP

The Spring Widow

Because you live inside my head.
Sometimes I hear you speaking.
More often you nod approval or
shake your head to comment, no.

Does my occipital lobe create you?
I don’t know the brain’s mechanism
well enough to tell. You sing on in
replay, in dream, in glimpsed shade.

In a pottery urn you once built layer
by layer. Clay I cannot fathom until 
I too have bit the dust— more a part 
of me than ever you could be in flesh. 

I scatter you as you would have wished
in our garden, to grow as spring greens.
I spread you on the surface of the pond.
Wind carries random ash onto my face.

I don’t wash you away for another day.
Cremains remain. I’ll serve myself next 
season’s sprouts, thinking about cycles’
return. They turn out fine, a bit crunchy. 

Who knew you’d return as dandelion,
that golden head, dent de lion, lion’s 
tooth. Grieving is a gift bereft of grit. 
Leaving is best left. Well enough. Alone.