Write only what you absolutely do not know, not what you’re merely 
not sure of.—Stephen Dunn 

Null. All. What’s after death or before.
Where my old dog is now, my mother, 
my father—not the ashes clumped
in a box, but the mad licking 
and tail-beating and the gaze, 
dense with devotion, of iris-less eyes. 
My father’s delight in anything 
wingless or red, why my mother left 
that night, barefoot and worried 
she’d miss it, the first landfall 
migration of geese in raft after dark raft 
aloft in a gray sky, an acre of feather and beak 
that boiled and blotted out the dark lake, 
and no sound but the high cry.