I'm afraid of dead things and semi trucks and heights
and forgetting you after you die
because you haven't left me anything.

I still have nightmares about mom.
Last night I saw her face
and locked myself in my room
before she could move.

I woke up gasping
as if morning saved me from drowning,
and I picture myself
still
blonde in summer,
waiting to be rescued by the shepherd's hook,
prone at the bottom of the pool
with sunken oak leaves and shrunken crape myrtle flowers
and bees pressed by the water,
trying to breathe the air out of my lungs
so I wouldn't rise.

I'm not afraid of death.
It doesn't float like a glass-eyed sparrow
tucked away in a jar or
stiffen the way I found that death things
become carved from wood
after their souls leave them alone in their cages,
like Rachel, but her fur was still soft
like it didn't belong to her anymore.
I was eight when I learned
rabbits are still soft after they die;
their eyes become milky.

If I ever have children,
I'm afraid they'll be just like me.
It's enough to look in the mirror
and see my mother blossoming forth
as though this was 1978,
with the same curves,
the same curls,
the same cheekbones.
It is only my eyes that save me.
Those belong to Oma
for six more months.

And I could never name a boy Lamar.
He'd end up dead by his own hand
limp, pale, on a plump bed of hydrangeas
in the ivy-cloaked lawn
glutted with seedling burrs
and the French bitterness of generations.

It was in that house on Forest Court
I learned of death the second time.
Her father's death was woven
into my mother and we sat in the wood paneled hall,
and she told me of running to the neighbors'
when her father wasn't breathing.
I've always had this romanticized picture of him,
his cigar smoke flooding the high rafters
of the Forest Court house.
I wish I had known him.

But the death of her brother is woven into me
as if I had lived it.
She showed me the room in the same ivy-covered house
when I was thirteen and
knew of death like a removed relative.
Even before I knew, this house seemed
frozen like a photograph,
dust motes suspended
in wet, stagnant air.
Always summer,
but always cold.

Lamar, her brother Lamar,
took his life in September.
She remembered that.
He'd shouted at her
no more than usual.
It was still light out
and the sun sifted
through the oak trees
to the old terrace.
The air smelled wooden,
ready for fall:
a gunshot rings.

I remember as she remembered
a pool of blood in the mudroom.
He couldn't speak.
There's a stag's head on the wall
and Persian carpets on the hardwood
and no cigar smoke
as if no one remembers.