Like kites, we wafted over
our other selves, bound
to still other selves on the
earth, worlds
that kept reeling us back.
How to exit in style? Death
was near, you knew.
No illusions of permanence
then, enough
of our words in ink and in
print.
We ghost-spoke till the end,
a fortnight beyond
the joke the day you
discovered somebody had
already filled in the
hospital blank: deceased.
Was it fitting they burned
you?
You spewed your gray and
white flakes
like shreds of ripped drafts into the wind.
They stuffed your leftover
cinders into a jar,
sealed this in a vault with a
solid brass plaque.
As if you could not escape into me.
DARK CHOCOLATE
How one bite
of chocolate
leads to the next . . .
That should be rather
the final couplet
of a list of adventures
from the first awkward graze
in the movie-house dark
or a borrowed car
or dim grove
(slapping mosquitoes)
to the full bit in a motel
cheap by the hour
(where Housekeeping forgot
the sliver of soap
in its give-away wrapper)
or the Waldorf-Astoria
(how could you pass up
those mint chocolates
on the pillows)
wherever, whenever, however, why
are no longer germane
but again
one bite of chocolate . . .
Elisavietta Ritchie's 15 books include Real Toads;
Awaiting Permission to Land; Spirit of the Walrus; Arc of the Storm; Elegy for
the Other Woman; Tightening The Circle Over Eel Country; Raking The Snow; In
Haste I Write You This Note; Flying Time.
A new collection will be out from Cherry Grove Collections in 2011. Editor, The
Dolphin's Arc: Endangered Creatures of the Sea,
and others; her work is widely published, translated, and anthologized.
Ex-president for poetry, then fiction, Washington Writers' Publishing House.
