Death Still Walks In

‘In the old days news of it traveled by foot.’
— Billy Collins, ‘Death’

Here’s how to miss the death
of a friend whose house
you glide by every day:

To start, be sure to catch
the first prognosis, then some
of the subsequent progress,

till her remission gets you briefly
off the hook, lets you breathe
and ease back into feeling

you’re as free as seeing her
walk again along the street.
Then, when her husband’s

standing over what will become
your listening shock
in a coffee shop, go on to ask him –

now only five months too late –
“And how are things going
for your wife these days?”

so that his bewildered eyes
can sweat the secret glistening
from your own, and so that

all day and all the next
this old news can circumvent
then crisscross the cracked and

hard-packed terrain of realization,
turning up undeniably during meetings,
conversations, the trip into work,

and in your dreams. “Only three
weeks before,” he’ll marvel,
“she’d hiked ten miles in Alaska

with our kids” – which will make
his next vacation all the odder
and all the more alone.

Here’s hoping he can freely comb
that moonlit Mexican beach,
lace his long and worthy fingers

around her Sunday birthday,
retrace the I-Am-Woman spring
that was in her stride and sprightly hair,

and face how she was nobody’s fool,
but the warm-witted epitome
of Baby, don’t tread on me.

– for Larry for Esther