Looks like a great send-off
at the table next to ours.
Grandma’s ashes in a varnished box
beside a vodka martini
we overhear them say,
she always took with a twist,
saved a forest from developers,
fly-fished in the Yukon, cruised
the Nile, Amazon and Ganges.
At seventy, straddled a hay bale
on her porch after hip surgery
to limber up for a camel ride
across the Gobi and sleep in a yurt.
A good death, they call it.
A good death, you echo
watching them leave, one
with closure. I laugh, lean
back, relish the razzmatazz buzz,
savory smells and tin ceiling,
then see from your expression
you’ve left this room. Back
to a war I once thought behind us,
where the memories
hot-wire your nightmares.
Corpses, villages clotted with smoke.
Friends blown apart, leaving you
to shoulder their story.
We were in a patrol boat, you whisper.
The children swam toward us.
We never dreamed…we thought
they were waving.