On my shelf of photographs
the dead have come to outnumber the living.
They stand like artificial flowers
among the real ones, so lifelike
even God might be fooled.
                                   *
My husband says spring will be early.
He says this every year,
and every year I disagree.
He needs me, the dark side
of the planetary equation.
Together we make the equinox.
                                   *
As the world grows darker
before my eyes, the sun
sends me sharper, harder
glances off glass, off ice—
like the white light reported
by the temporarily dead,
the brightness they are teased with
and turned away from.
                                   *
Another chance to wake up together,
accepting the invitation
of one more morning. Another chance
to push the black dream of waking alone
over the edge of the world,
where there is no life to sustain me.
                                   *
Only after
our garden became a graveyard
strewn with shriveled leaves
did the white stem rise
from the hermetic bulb,
displaying five lavender petals:
Colchicum autumnale—
a brilliant contradiction,
out of phase, like an angel
strayed into Time, our world.
                                   *
Though I fly, like the crow,
the shortest distance to death,
some knowledge will always remain foreclosed.
                                   *
At twilight, water in roadside ditches
pulls down the last light
to be transformed from lead
into softly gleaming silver.
It has taken me years to discover
this slant conjunction of sky and water
late in the day, when the dead
are allowed their brief shining.