Lee Visits

For L.C.B., gone too soon

Lee Visits

For L.C.B., gone too soon.

i.)

She last-born and I first, ten years between—

enough to unstick us some, but not enough

to unbind us. Nineteen years since her cancer now.

In her bay window, matching the Bay itself,

a blue pancake of glass on a leader line

seemed to hover, aware, and answering every breath.

Embossed upon it, a hummingbird, suspended

near a bud—a mirror of her state: arrived,

but denied—herself so quick then, and the moment

itself so quick. When, after, I had my pick,

it was all I took. Now, on its leader line,

in the curve of my bedside lamp, it might not stir

for years at a stretch, yet wheels in the still air

suddenly, sometimes, as if she flutters there.

Her Leaving

ii.)

She was a singer—the kind we mean when telling

of voices that are themselves a language, playing

a music that is itself a word, unwritten,

unspelled, defining beauties as commonplace

as breathing, or looking you in the eye and smiling.

She lived on a sailboat; had a sailor lover

she thought she’d marry, who thought otherwise;

and so did she, then; but she kept the boat

and her heart well, across her single ocean.

She was a love-magnet of a sort, who drew

love lodestones to her: hearts that were attached

instantly and forever, who, when she died

lost some of themselves, and turned to me, as though

there were a coda. Some lyric of hers I’d know.

© MB, 6/5/26