On the Subject of Incredulity

I have no thoughts on this death.
Or, none that are relevant:
I have thoughts: I think: I don’t
believe it. I believe this is a hoax,
suddenly I understand people who don’t
believe in moon landings, or global
warming, or aphids, or empathy.
Why should they? Why should anyone
do anything she doesn’t want to do,
like live, for example, survive?
Why should I survive the death
of another too-young woman,
another cracked mirror image,
headed for the crematorium floor,
a fine dust; why am I not so fine
as that, to be sprinkled, scattered,
parcelled out among friends and eaten
by the wind coming hard over the water
tonight, coming for the lightest of us
first, the incinerated grain of that darkness
you always saw in her, didn’t you, 
the fire, manifest.

Raising the Bar

The guy out back fingering his girlfriend.
Crackstrung sunbeaned woman teefing tips
right off the bar. The lacquered boys are back in town, 
the girls leaving, pounding whiskey and high heels.
The patio tree contemplates scarlet cufflinks.
A man with rolled trouser cuffs sucks 
at a cigarette like a cracked pen while the man 
with no right arm taps the ghost of a heater 
off his dried-out Bic.

Some bereft mother due north is screaming Give us back
our children at a streetlamp. Some onetime bombshell blonde
detonated and wracked is croaking I can't find my boyfriend.
I can't find my phone. I can't find my beer. What I
can't find is the year she turned twenty-two, or
I would give it back to her, like a firearm,
the Winchester life served her up instead, oiled, loaded,
cocked.

Rivers of Morning in America

There was beauty in America and I found it.

Everything was free: the deer, the libraries, lunch.
It was a hitched ride with the fire chief, this free

and fine America, the sailor who gave me a ticket 
for a Cessna flight up the coast at dawn

the rocks brimming out of the salt blue
like knuckles ruddy with victory – 

and the Cessna bounced with every invisible 
pothole, every clump of air we hit and the man

next to me read a book and below us
there were islands and mist spidering

like lifelines along the water, best suit blue.

This America a tiller in the hand,
bearing away.

There were orchards, bears, rivers
of morning and dusk and rain

and pickups stopping to offer
a lift as far as the fork in the road – 

and there the tamarind-breasted
warbler would peck at the night's harvest

of skittled junebugs, then the bright rain
and the dark black beauty of the woods,

I found beauty in America

where the daily boxscores told the tale 
of someone winning, and no one got shot

under the large American moon
that sang itself white in the April nights

as though it were made of light,
as though all lies were always

this pretty.

Eva H.D. wrote Rotten Perfect Mouth, "38 Michigans," & "Bonedog" (from I'm Thinking of Ending Things). She works in your favourite bar.