It was not in front of the dead girl’s house, the girl who drowned
last summer, where I heard weeping. But it was in front of her house,
the house of the girl who drowned last summer,
where we found a dozen raw steaks. Swollen blue
in styrofoam like birthday mylars tugged under by the salt line
that shoved past us on its way upriver. A butternut squash,
dentureless mouth. Iceberg lettuce, crumpled blouse.
Gala apples, grapes escaping their slackened skins.
The house flies feasted. Someone wept for some reason

and we stood waist deep in the river. The water thick
as a man’s voice after drinking/crying. It touched us everywhere.
It made us aware of touch. What we felt was not the river
or its slick of gasoline but our own forgotten exteriors.
I hated it, remembering. In front of the drowned girl’s house

there was no weeping, but there was a cross of carnations
sagging on its armature like Van Eyck’s blue-handed thieves,
wretched with paradise, the hope for it. We kept our neighbour’s
belongings after he was evicted. Sleeping in the minivan,
his girlfriend in the domestic shelter. We kept the Hefty bags
and drove to the Red Lobster where she worked
to see if we could find him when he stopped returning calls.

It was at the sidewalk cafe table at the Kosher Mexican restaurant
where we watched with pleasure as a man carried carnations past
singing D’Angelo. Was the pleasure of his singing erased
when the woman came by a moment later screaming
‘they raped my daughter they raped my daughter are raping my daughter’?
It was not erased. The moments sat on top of each other and slowly
what was underneath began to rot like leaves. What was left
was the absence of clove perfume, her shift in tense.

Who was weeping, then, if not the family of the drowned child?
I am comforted by the idea of my own finitude. Every poem
about my fear of death, every poem about my fear of living forever.
I am full of endless rooms. Carnations and the desire to know
who is weeping and why. Carnations, so many in so many rooms.

H.R. Webster