The road to the past is dirt
with a slant wood
fence that winds
beside it down the hill.
Calcium pours out of your bones
into your tissue,
salt burns like rope
through your hands.
Why wait another five minutes?
you thought. After that,
it was one foot in front
of the other.
*
She had to have shopped for the hose,
measured it, fit it with duct tape to
the pipe and run it through the back
seat, had to have chosen the spot,
driven there, looked east
over the freeway, smoked.
Had to have said goodbye to her
cat, still in the house when
the examiner arrived,
must have studied, learned how long
till sleep came, whether
there’d be pain.
She would have thought of the choices.
No blood, no shock. Two years
later, on a highway
in New Jersey, standing in the exhaust to tie
down 2 x 4’s, I thought: this was
the last air she breathed.
*
Summer returns like a sleeping
boy, the sky in the city
is full again
of the last air. Over the
canal, over the wooden
stairway sagging
back of the house, over
the gurney
at the funeral
home in the Fremont
district, just the other side
of the bridge
where Fred’s gallery perched
in the desert
of Seattle. On the bed
an old pink
quilt, its childish
planets spinning.