Tips of the reeds silver in sunlight. A cold wind
sways them, it hisses through quills of the pines.
Sky is clearest blue because so cold. Birds drop down
in the dappled yard: white breast of nuthatch, slate
catbird, cardinal the color of blood.

Until today in Delaware, Elizabeth, I didn’t know
you died in Boston a week ago. How can it be
you went from the world without my knowing?
Your body turned to ash before I knew. Why was there
no tremor of the ground or air? No lightning flick
between our nerves? How can I believe? How grieve?

I walk the shore. Scraped hard as a floor by wind.
Screams of terns. Smash of heavy waves. Wind rips
the corners of my eyes. Salty streams freeze on my face.
A life is little as a dropped feather. Or split shell
tossed ashore, lost under sand…. But vision lives!
Vision, potent, regenerative, lives in bodies of words.
Your vision lives, Elizabeth, your words
from lip to lip perpetuated.

Two days have passed. Enough time, I think, for death
to be over.  As if your death were not before my knowing. 
For a moment I jump back to when all was well and ordinary.
Today I could phone to Boston, say Hello…. Oh, no!
Time’s tape runs forward only. There is no replay.

Light hurts. Yet the sky is dull today. I walk the shore. 
I meet a red retriever, young, eager, galloping
out of the surf.  At first I do not notice his impairment. 
His right hind leg is missing.  Omens.…
I thought I saw a rabbit in the yard this morning.
It was a squirrel, its tail torn off. Distortions.… 

Ocean is gray again today, old and creased aluminum
without sheen. Nothing to see on that expanse. 
Except, far out, low over sluggish waves, a long
clotted black string of cormorants trails south.
Fog-gray rags of foam swell in scallops up the beach,
their outlines traced by a troupe of pipers –
your pipers, Elizabeth! – their racing legs like the spokes
of tiny wire wheels.

Faintly, the flying string can still be seen.
It swerves, lowers, touching the farthest tips of waves.
Now it veers, appears to shorten, points straight out.
It slips behind the horizon. Vanished.

But vision lives, Elizabeth. Your vision multiplies,
is magnified in the bodies of words.
Not vanished, your vision lives from eye to eye,
your words from lip to lip perpetuated.
                                                                  May Swenson