In memory of Julieta Toro
For forty nights
my wife dreamed of you,
and continues to light
a candle each day.
After nine months, the pain
is something she can set free,
or so she thinks––grief,
a small bird whose claws
have hollowed out her heart.
The night is long as she is alive,
and able to imagine in a thousand ways
what may lay beyond the moon
or memory of your face.
Flowering red tobacco
at your bare feet, you rise,
wrists curl like smoke
ascending moonlight,
and not one of us is with you
in those dreams
where you dance with who
and knowing what––
or how she keeps
a toy deer on her altar now
because it reminds her
of the vision you had
a week before the hospital.
How quickly light can scatter,
or does the fawn disappear
into the forest’s duff,
while we can only wait
and hope to see you again,
in some new form,
dappled white in the sunlight.