Origami Microchap

Given

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Cover collage by JanK

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Violet filter

When I receive an email
from a friend who has been gone
(by which I mean dead)
for more than a year,
I know spam,
but I want to open it, to ask:
What's the landscape
where you are now?
Are your clouds cumulous
like in Renaissance paintings, or
flat and Persian, or as thin
as early morning LA smog?

*

In this room hold time

Even now, with my mother forgetting
most of what she knew, I expect her
to be there, in that apartment
she chose after so many different houses,
I think, I'll call tomorrow,
even though be real,
which tomorrow will she be in?
She holds the forms of conversation
in her stripped-down room,
however frequent the repeat button.
Don't forget to water the plants,
to turn off the stove.
Remember me.

On grief in spring

In spring, you forget
the golden season of dried grasses
is on its way, your eyes distracted
by the varieties of green. Then,
and now, seabirds poke in the mud
at the estuary's edge. An egret,
Urban-adapted, stands back, long legs
carrying that egg-shaped body.
Wind blows through the cypress,
and you miss all the ones
that have been trimmed away.

*

About that call

I could tell you I deleted that email,
the way I woke from the dreams
where my grandmother phoned
with a recipe, or directions
to the cemetery. I never did delete
my friend's last messages
on my old phone, but then
that phone was stolen. The new one
has a message from my mother,
hanging on.

*

Carol Dorf © 2020