by David Tarleton

 

“I CELEBRATE myself, and sing myself,
And what I assume you shall assume,
For every atom belonging to me as good belongs to you.”

–Song of Myself, Walt Whitman

 

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You do not see. You do not hear. You do not touch, taste, smell, or even feel. There are no verbs for you anymore, not like before. Like all ghosts, you are history, past, yet as your grandfather liked to say: a story repeated keeps the past present. On his deathbed, he asked you to read from his favorite book, Leaves of Grass. He asked you to open to Song of Myself and start at the beginning. You had grown up with this poem, had heard your grandfather read it too many times to count, had even memorized your favorite parts; before graduating high school you were required to give a recitation and you couldn’t imagine delivering anything but Whitman’s words, the words of your grandfather. He had once told you that the meaning of life was contained in that poem, and you had spent a lifetime trying to coax and discern it. As you read, his breathing grew shallow, quieter, exhausted, Stop this day and night with me and you shall possess the origin of all poems, You shall possess the good of the earth and sun, (there are millions of suns left) and hitched at these lines: You shall no longer take things at second or third hand, nor look through the eyes of the dead, nor feed on the spectres in books. You paused, watched his closed-eyed movement, and trembled anticipating his next labored breath, hoping for even a few more, and when he drew another, you exhaled, returned to the page, and spoke the words: You shall not look through my eyes either, nor take things from me. You shall listen to all sides and filter them from your self. At the word self, your grandfather exhaled, a long loose release of air, and that was it. He did not take another breath. Those words, Whitman’s words—not yours—were the last words he heard as he died. You shut the book, and closed his eyes with your fingertips. You prayed for his soul, for its release, and imagined him hovering over you for a moment, taking one last look at you, and the light bulb in the lamp popped, darkening the room. Green and blue spots floated in front of your eyes, and you whispered, “I love you.” The room filled, with nothing visible, but just felt occupied, somehow, and then it emptied, and your shoulders sagged. You decided that your grandfather had vacated the world, that he had died in peace, and what he was had moved beyond, for at the time, when you were still alive, you did not understand his moment of death. But now you have experienced your own death. And there is no beyond you can see, only a present always present, of energy surging ebbing, atoms pulling with the pulse of the universe. You remain watching waiting telling. You are narrator. You are poetry. You are song.

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A memory of a kite of balsa wood, covered in painted paper, bright red and delicate. You built it when you were eleven, with the help of your father, spent a Saturday afternoon cutting the frame and painting the sail and wrapping it together in tiny rounds of twine. The result was a somewhat clumsy, yet elegant and fragile airfoil diamond, tailed and trailing tiny scraps of life. You brought it to park at the edge of the river, where the wind blew strongest, shuddering through the valley. The kite seemed as if it wanted to be free, as if it had desires of its own, as if it longed to disappear into the atmosphere, and climb into the clouds, never to be seen on earth again. Fluttering in the sky, swooping and shivering against the wind, yearning, yet always tethered to the earth. In death you are that kite, you tug against the string, until this tugging pulls you away from the sky, and turns you to face the earth. You have not the narrow vision of a single pair of eyes, but that of a thousand eyes seeing everything at once, like watching a map come to life. Have you reckon’d a thousand acres much? have you reckon’d the/earth much? It is all there, and so very far away, yet you see in exquisite detail, Your ties and ballasts leave you, your elbows rest in sea-gaps, You skirt sierras, your palms cover continents, You are afoot with your vision; a single weed grows from the tar roof of the brick building that contains the Woolworth’s; grooves of time etch into the rubber that coats wires of the traffic lights; the paint that indicates a crosswalk is cracked and faded; flashes of sunlight glint off the crumpled hood of the black Chevrolet, each red hair of the man leaning against the open driver’s side door shines brighter than stars, teardrops fall from his cheeks like crystal rain; and the body of a woman lies in the street, her white pants glowing against the dark field of blacktop, her navy blue coat rumpled and dirt-smeared, a pool of liquid darker than the asphalt spreads out from her wavy black hair, her mouth open and still, her eyes are closed, her body is empty of what once animated it. You are hammered by the sudden understanding of what it means to be dead. You have no weight, no feeling, and though it might seem that you are watching from above, you are really nowhere and everywhere all at once. You are mingling with the atoms of the atmosphere, dancing with electrons; you are the purest energy.

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On the sidewalk at edge of the crosswalk in front of the store is the body of a little girl—she is three years old—lying on her back, her eyes closed, her pink dress peeking out from beneath her brown wool coat, one miniature Mary Jane on her stocking foot, the other missing. This is your daughter. You held her wrapped in a pink wool blanket, her skin wrinkled and splotched, her mouth wide and crying, devastated by the act of being born. The sudden emptiness between your legs at the moment of her birth; this emptiness you feel again at the sight of her unmoving body. Her name is Diana—named for the singer and actress, a celebrity your husband, Billy adores—and she is your only child. You want to run to her, to touch her face, to wake her up, to hold her, to pick up her limp little body and carry her to safety, to love her back to life. You are her savior, her mother. All you may do, however, is move closer. Closer. Closer. You see her chest rising and falling, thumping with the hummingbird beats of her heart, and know that she is still alive. Your only daughter, your only child, is for the moment, still alive.

 

It feels as if you do not move so much as the world moves for you. Again, when you were eleven, your father took you with him on one of his surveying trips to the marshes north of Blueville, across the Owasco River, where they soon built the Blueville Steam Plant, and he allowed you to help him sight through the theodolite. With your face to the eyepiece, the hills sprang forward, larger, in focus, sanctioned by the narrow realm of viewfinder. You felt exhilarated with the power to move the world. Diana is that close to you. She is within the theodolite that is your heart. The red haired man kneels beside her—Floyd is his name and you rediscover that you love him, as if you could forget anything now—and he is sobbing still, his touch tentative and tender, the way he might touch his own daughter. “Wake up, Diana,” he pleads, between sobs, his voice keening like the sirens that wail in the distance. There is a moment of pure calm then, like the silence that follows the prayers of Sunday. It is like watching a film when the projector has stuck—this happens, sometimes, to the old cartoon reels they show at the North Park Theater on Saturday mornings—and a single frame wavers and trembles on screen, holding for seconds before the celluloid snaps and the screen goes white. You wonder at how the streets of Blueville could be so empty in this moment; that no other cars drive along Rochester Street, swerving around your shattered body, that no one from the Woolworth’s comes running into the street, that no children with dogs stop to stare, that no women are screaming, that no men are kneeling beside your twisted body with a jacket to cover the blank features that approximate your face. Even the man lover killer Floyd has grown quieter, though his breathing is like silent sobbing, and Diana is breathing, the air whistling through her blood caked nostrils—you wish for hands again, and a tissue—her eyes closed, unmoving beneath the lids, not like at night when you watch her eyes dart and dream beneath her murmuring lids. Her open mouth is the only thing, the breath crossing her lips visible, pink, ribbons of exhalation that twine into the atmosphere and disappear. This delights you for a moment, to imagine every person on the great wide earth exhaling ribbons of color, until you notice that lover killer Floyd is not breathing color, only Diana. The inside of her mouth his pink and wet, streaked with blood, and her throat is a dark, crimson tunnel, and the air moves secretly there, and inside her lungs are pockets of pink; it doesn’t occur to you that seeing into the spaces of your daughter’s lungs should be impossible, for you would insinuate yourself into every available space of her body if possible, and cup your hands around her heart, and clasp your hands to make if beat if that was what was needed, and remain there for the rest of her life, living for her if that was what was needed, and

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they are trying to make your heart beat again. You are not a doctor, but if you could, you would tell them to stop, please stop, there is no raising the dead. In another part of the hospital, Billy stands beside Diana’s bed, still dressed in sooty, dark green coveralls, his face scrubbed pink, his brown hair matted from his hardhat. There are two glistening lines on his cheeks, and you know that he cries for you—somehow you hear then, the echoes of his grief, hear the memory of how he spoke your name, just once—Nancy—choking it from his shuddering chest—but being the practical man you love, he wastes no time at the side of his dead wife, choosing instead to watch with fierce attention his still living daughter. That you want to hold him and thank him for his devotion is how you feel keenly, all at once, the loss of your own life. You would urge your spirit into your body, just long enough to feel his arms wrapped around you, to feel the comforting crush of his biceps encircling you. Instead, you listen to the doctors explain that Diana has a broken leg and a few broken ribs, but is for the most part unscathed owing to the fact that your body bore the brunt of the impact—this is no coincidence you want to say, you heard, at the last moment—too late, too late—heard that Detroit chariot of death coming, and shielded Diana’s body with your own. Diana was thrown some distance, striking the back of her head on the sidewalk curb, and fluid had filled her skull, swelling and constricting her brain. Diana’s head is shorn of her butter-blond hair, and there is a shunted hole to relieve the pressure. The hole glows pink, as if pulsing with dreams, or indicating that what is she will soon leak out into the atmosphere. You see this pink, but no one else does, and meanwhile she holds on, she sleeps, she travels the unfathomable deep of a sea of coma. Attached to her skull are small white electrodes, a medusa of wires that congregate at a machine beside the bed. It blinks, beeps, and rustles like grasshoppers as its delicate metal arms scribble waves in four parallel lines across a continuous strip of paper. The paper continues to be fed through the machine, the drawn waves filling the white, and the readout gathers on the floor beside the machine, folding in on itself, coiling and piling, and at times, a white-coated doctor comes, retrieves and examines a section of the readout, and makes a note on Diana’s chart. You do not understand the readouts, To me the converging objects of the universe perpetually flow, All are written to me, and I must get what the writing means and see only a continuous stream of inked waves, with occasional peaks and valleys spiking erratically across the page. The chart at the foot of the bed reads, “damage to the occipital lobe, extent of effects on visual cortex unknown.” Billy slumps uncomfortably in a chair beside the bed, and see Lucinda, who was once your friend come into the room and check on Diana and place a blanket over Billy then leave and then in the night the room is silent but for the scribbling of the machine, drawing its infinite mountain lines, troughing and valleying into the early grey of morning, a pulling, a spinning, a pin-the-tail-on-the-donkey-blindfolded reeling and

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the grass. And now it seems to me the beautiful uncut hair of graves. A grave. Your grave. Grass surrounds. Tombstones surround. The impassive stones that receive and return so many echoes. The white and grey-flecked rectangular stone reads, Nancy Webb, Loving Wife and Mother, 1960-1982. The words are cut into the granite, chiseled by hand, rough-hewn, the letters strong, proud wearing serifs.  There is so much more a stone might say, if only there were space to carve upon, if only there were a hundred stones, stacked on top of another, and a story stretched continuously upon their faces, a story that would begin with birth and end with death and a towering poem of moments in between. The Reverend Severance’s voice drones, softly, like summer bumblebees, and beside him slumps Billy, red-faced and fidgety in the one suit he owns, and beside him his parents, then your mother father, behind them aunts and uncles and cousins, and some of your friends from high school. Lover killer Floyd is not there, and you are gladdened and saddened, but Lucinda is there, with Becky, and they stand near the back, as if trying to hide. You wish for a moment you had apologized to her, just once, but she would not see you, and so wrote her a letter and sent it, but had never known if it had been received. But you know now, see it in the way Lucinda cries quietly with a handkerchief held to her face, holding her little girl’s hand, the child wide-eyed and bewildered, too young to stand watch over death, but present all the same, and you realize that you have now earned her forgiveness, even though you no longer need this. You see her guilt at never having communicated this to you, but it is too late. She will have a difficult future now, for just like your husband and your daughter, for now they all face the world alone, “And after my skin has been destroyed, yet in my flesh I will see God, whom I will see for myself, and whom my own eyes will behold, and not another. My heart grows faint within me…” and faintness you understand for you seem a shadow to yourself, but you do not see any Gods, only the dimness of the world,  “…even when I must walk through a dark ravine, I fear no danger, for you are with me; your rod and your staff keep me calm. You prepare a feast before me in plain sight of my enemies. You refresh my head with oil; my cup is full of wine. Surely your goodness and faithfulness will pursue me all the days of my life, and I will live in the Lord’s palace for the rest of my life,” and the coffin sinks into the grave, and shovels full of dirt fall inside and each time the dirt rains down on the shiny wood, it is like snowflakes on the back of the neck, one by one falling and accumulating until their weight amasses, blankets, dims, and

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they shine like stars, the souls of Blueville, oh how the cemetery is basked in their light. Imagine the night sky, clear of cloud, full of stars. Looking down, into town, you will find places of darkness, pierced only by the occasional pinprick of light, and yet there are spaces so crowded with stars that the darkness is overpowered, banished. You realize early on that these points of light are the spirits of those still living, that the souls of Blueville are like a night sky, with a single star here, a family of three stars there, a group of star souls drinking at the bar over there, shooting stars driving in cars. Sometimes these soul stars gather into galaxies, at the high school football games, or town council meetings, and you are found now among the hundreds of spirits pulsating, quasar-ing, supernova-ing like the Milky Way, within the few acres of Blueville Cemetery. Across the firmament of Blueville, families form constellations, connecting by invisible lines to one another; the Webb and Dougherty Family constellation has points on Spring Street and Loveless Street and Kentucky Street and Cumberland Street, but there is a now flickering, shuddering point on Green Street that concerns you most. Even when a star dies, the light from this star still exists for awhile, traveling through the vastness of space, and it is sometimes, thousands, or millions even, of years before it finds an eye to penetrate. Those on Earth are often gazing at stars that have long since died, they just do not know it, yet. The ghosts of Blueville shine like these bodies, celestial afterimages echoing a life past. You have become one of these stars, broadcasting from nothing. You sense perhaps, that your time has limits, that at some point your light will reach its destination, that the energy will be absorbed, sinking into black, glittering no more. There are some nights when a grave goes inexplicably dark. The other ghosts, they know this too, it seems, for each projects outward, and you do the same, transmitting towards the blue house on Green street where Billy comes home, and Diana does not. But Billy spends little time in the house on Green Street. He arrives from work, stays long enough to change clothes and make himself a quick sandwich, then leaves. He is gone until nine or ten, and then returns to the empty house, trudges up the stairs, and after kicking off his shoes, falls into bed fully clothed. You see all this not in a sequence of time, not hours or days, but overlays—(these are Billy: a pot-bellied, tow-headed six-year old, standing before you beside the teeter-totter with a daisy he picked in the field behind the elementary school, promising to marry you, someday; a mean-skinny ten-year old, riding by on a red bicycle as you walk home from school along Oswego Street, calling you stupid girl; a lean seventeen-year old runner, alongside you in the fields under the moonlight; an eighteen-year old man, standing tall beside you in his father’s suit just days after you both graduate high school, promising to love you for better or worse, but looking at you in a way that betrays a drop of sadness beneath the happiness—he fears that you do not love him the way he does you and maybe he is right, you just don’t know; the thin man who carries you over the threshold of the light blue house on Green Street, promising you sublime husbandhood and fatherhood)—Billy coming and going, returning and leaving, waking and sleeping, restlessness like a flutter of pages, as if there are hundreds of Billy, in every room of the house, like a photograph exposed over and over until unintelligible. You find him in bed. He is thinner than he should be, his shirt gathered like a blanket across his chest, the cuffs cavernous around his wrists, and even his feet seem too large, as if he still needed to grow into them, like the German Shepherd puppy, Roscoe, you loved when you were nine. He lies on his back, staring upward, and you wish to know what he thinks. You peel back his layers, he is skin and hair and teeth, he is muscle and vein and blood, he is stomach and mouth and heart and brain—though you don’t see anything, in a way you see everything—but inside, his thoughts, these are not visible, even to a ghost like you. His heart beats. His blood flows, his chest rises and falls, his outstretched arm lingers on your side of the bed, and he grasps the pillow, bringing it to his face, and inhales. Just once, as if savoring the smell, but rationing it as well. A sob escapes him, a sound that becomes visible in the darkness, and it floats upward, jagged. You do not need to read minds to understand grief. You cannot go to him, though you try, This is the press of a bashful hand, this the float and odor of hair, this the touch of my lips to yours, this the murmur of yearning, sending something to his sleeping mind and body, love wrapped in frequencies of light invisible to the human eye, ultraviolet, spectral, phantom blues and purples that must exist, taken on faith, be it in God or Schumann, whether by prayer or nanometer. You understand what it means now to haunt a house, as you fill the rooms with your ultraviolessence, and embed yourself in the fabric of place, your particles mingling, stewing, with the flavors of wood and wool and plaster and rubber and paint and cotton and leather and dust and dirt and copper and steel and nylon and polyester and plastic and water and sunlight and shadow and breath and soul and

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Diana Diana Diana Diana Diana Diana Diana Diana Diana Diana Diana Diana in your womb, growing, rotating, kicking, beating, murmuring, glimmering; only hours old, wrinkled and pink, her eyes locking on yours, her mouth on your breast, and you are in love; crying, croupy, angry at the unfairness of a world in which she cannot communicate her most basic needs (of this you are sure, just listening to her); on fat legs, trembling, shakily stumbling across the carpet; growing a little more each time you close your eyes, it seems; a head full of silky hair the color of oleo, dimpled cheeks like her father, tan eyes like her mother, strong legs like her father, curious like her mother; she is the hand-holding, swing set swinging, doll mothering, horse loving, pink wearing, ice cream eating, onion hating, precocious and sweet talking, too intelligent, running, yelling, crying, giggling daughter you had always hoped for and

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She lies, unstirring, unblinking, breathing, stilling, beneath the Huckleberry Hound sheets on her big-girl bed. Through the sheets her body is slight, emaciated, the musculature faded, shrunken, atrophied, and each breath she draws is an effort. But she breathes on her own. There are no machines here, no lurking mechanism scribbling prophecy, only a clear, liquid-filled bag hanging from a metal rack that feeds fluid into a tube connected to Diana. Her hair is grown in like a little boy’s, and the hole in her skull is bandaged over, but it glows pink through the gauze. Inside her head, beneath her skull, in the occipital lobe at the rear of her brain, the tissue is dark grey, wilted, close to dead. The neurons in her brain fire continuously, sparks jolting along minute paths, but the electric impulses that travel to this part of her brain cease at the damage, absorbed the way a shadow devours  light. You remain with her. Each atom of you finds a place in space in this pink walled, doll filled room. Late one night, when Billy sleeps, Diana’s eyes open for a moment or two. She stirs, her hands clasping, and her mouth opens and closes. She makes a rasping sound then falls silent. She wants to wake, it seems, but does not know how. At this moment, your desire makes you coalesce, drawing the particles of you together, forming two helical shapes intertwined in the air, and you glow ultraviolet, invisible, but luminescent all the same, growing brighter and brighter. This is revelation, form. You experiment in the darkness of Diana’s room, where the only audience is oblivious. You create shapes of yourself—a hand, and eye, a mouth, a nose, a face even—formations familiar to your atomic memory. After a few unsuccessful attempts at other forms—you try to become a dove, but realize that you are your hands, clasped together about the thumbs, the way you made shadow birds for Diana at night—you conclude that you are capable of only yourself. Still you play, swirling from one form to another, drawing and scattering your atoms, experiencing the first moments of joy since your death, finding comfort in this control you exert over your being. You have become, almost by accident, a true ghost.

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There comes a day when Diana opens her eyes for Billy as he checks in on her in the morning before going to work. The sun, low in the morning sky, bathes the room in brilliance and Billy calls out to someone. Your mother comes into the room. Diana speaks creakily to Billy, and her weak hands scrabble on the sheets as she tries to raise a stick-like arm. She asks for you. She asks why the room is black. She gropes, says she can’t see nothing. Billy waves a hand in front of her face, but she does not even blink. He picks up the telephone, makes a call. Your mother cries. A doctor arrives, asks Diana a series of questions, shines a light in her eyes, examining the pupils, which react to the light by contracting, references her medical chart, makes phone calls during which he speaks softly, says yes a lot, and keeps his face calm. When he hangs up the phone, he states evenly that it is as they had expected, that the visual cortex is severely damaged, has not recovered, and though Diana’s eyes are functioning normally, her brain is unable to process the information. Your daughter is blind. This moment of relief, that Diana is conscious, is now tinged once more with the crushing anxiety of those coma days.

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Diana remains in bed, propped up on pillows, too weak to do more than move her arms and hands, except for when Billy or your mother help her from bed, and guide her around her bedroom, tottering on rickety legs. She had only been walking for two years before the accident, and so must learn again what her muscles have quickly forgotten. Unable to see, her natural sleeping rhythms are disrupted, and she wakes and sleeps at all different hours of the day and night. You watch all this from the walls of Diana’s room, peering out from between the atoms of pink paint, in disguise from the living. At night, when the house sleeps, you emerge, coalescing once more, swirling in ultraviolet patterns above Diana’s bed, shifting shapes, watching over her. Watching soon becomes not enough, and you send your atoms into her, beneath her skin, into her blood vessels, into her beating heart, and her body glows blue with your presence, yet she sleeps, peaceful and unaware. You grow more daring, and move deeper into Diana’s head, until you have penetrated further than the level of matter, infusing your substance into her brain, matter and after-matter, atoms all together, and you recognize yourself within her, your protons and electrons commune with hers, creating atomic mother-daughter pairs, and Diana opens her eyes, and says, Mommy? Her voice speaking to you. Does Diana see you somehow, when she sees nothing else? I miss you, Mommy, she says, and in response, still within your daughter, closer than a parent and child have ever been, you concentrate near the back of her skull, in the area you imagine (for you are unsure, operating on hunches) to be the occipital lobe, and form the shape of your face. You cannot speak, and she cannot see, and so you hope that this is enough. I see you, Mommy, Diana says, and you break apart, torn from her all over again, shivering the air, the excitement scattering each particle, you pinball off atoms of oxygen and carbon dioxide until, eventually, you return and coalesce above her, your light shining for your little girl. That she sees you must be what is meant when the living talk about miracles. When you were alive, you did not believe, not in the way the other Sunday folk did. The face of Christ appearing burned into cloth seemed fanciful and metaphorical, if not implausible. Water is water, never wine, and bread does not multiply. Yet Diana sees you. This post-mortality is nothing like what you imagined; there are no clouds to float upon, no lights other than the sun, and you have begun to believe it possible that history has confused atoms for angels. A thousand of you could dance on the head of a pin if you chose to do so. But you have found a way to be with Diana again, a way to make yourself visible, if only to her, and it is almost like being alive again. This might be the closest there is to a Heaven, but it could just as easily be what is meant by Hell. Like almost everything you ever experienced, it is both and neither, something half-way, dual, dichotomous, the binary opposition proving false, muddied, adulterated. In Sunday school you learned that there was good or evil, Heaven or Hell, and you remember a kitchen table moment with your mother from before, when your feet did not yet reach the floor, and she asked and you answered, the opposite of happy is…sad, of good is…bad, of wrong is…right, of dark is…light. But as you grew older you learned that there are no oppositions, just varying degree of conjunction. You remember your wedding day, the trembling lacy happiness standing next to Billy, and the look of disappointment on your father’s face an echo of the argument a few days prior when you chose Billy over college and broke his heart. In the darkest moments after—those nights after the two of you argued about money and slept at the far edges of each of your sides of the bed, a gulf of dormant frustration between you—you sometimes wondered about your choice, but on those mornings Billy would awake you with apologetic kisses and the two of you would make slow love in the grey morning, in the lightening dawn that seemed like a mixture of day and night, of your happiness and sadness. It was on one of those mornings that Diana was conceived, of this you are certain. Everything always mixing and merging, forming and re-forming, the opposites coming together blending and…you stop. You see. You gather all that remains of you, coalescing tightly above Diana, and plummet into her, the way you remember that the wind died, and that red paper kite fell from the sky. You concentrate each atom inside of the death that casts a shadow upon the occipital lobe of her brain. You find each cell intact, bruised, but dormant, as if still comatose, still healing. For every atom of hers, you couple one of you, like connecting calls at the telephone company switchboard, cables inserted into corresponding sockets, connections made, you pair and parse whatever force you are; you are neurons, ganglia, axons; you are oxygen, carbon, hydrogen; you are the firing of one hundred trillion synapses; you are the matter that came into being at the hottest moment that began the universe. You feel the first electrical impulse from the retina reach the visual cortex and you see Billy standing in the darkness next to Diana’s bed, half-lit in the blue black moonlight, just awoken, hair stuck out at the sides, stubble sprayed across his face, rubbing his so tired eyes and There was never any more inception than there is now, Nor any more youth or age than there is now, And will never be any more perfection than there is now, Nor any more heaven or hell than there is now, Oh that you see him once more and that Diana sees him, both you and Diana, and as you join and cease these fragments come to you, the Whitman poem between you and your grandfather, I know I am deathless, I know this orbit of mine cannot be swept by a carpenter’s compass, I know I shall not pass like a child’s carlacue cut with a burnt stick at night…and you see Diana from the Fourth of July past, in the backyard darkness waving sparklers in the air, those tiny bursts reflections of the joy in her eyes and you fight to hold your place, willing your atoms to fuse with hers, and the vision of Billy grows sharper in the blue light as you feel as though you are sinking and fading, and you know somehow that this will be the last time you see him I bequeath myself to the dirt to grow from the grass I love, If you want me again look for me under your boot-soles. You will hardly know who I am or what I mean, But I shall be good health to you nevertheless, And filter and fibre your blood. Failing to fetch me at first keep encouraged, Missing me one place search another, I stop somewhere waiting for you and he speaks, “Diana, what is it? What’s wrong?” “I sawed Mommy,” sheyou answers and, “I see Mommy too, sometimes, honey,” and sheyou says, “I see you too, Daddy. You have silly bed-hair,” and Billy pauses for a moment, ingesting the realization and then rushes to the side of the bed and gathers Diana up, and just for a moment you almost feel his arms around Diana but you realize that you feel nothing but your beautiful invisibility, that you are no longer you, and Diana’s eyes that will watch the world anew, even as a part of her is always wishing and searching for and missing and hoping for you…