Steve Shoemaker

 

Elegy

These mean suburban streets winding
right past our white-shingled house
with their broken bones, their littered dead --
And on to where?
Sweet Blanche, ghost white,
remembered, white
(like this page)
is dead.


Let this white blankly speak grief
& the hollows of absence, the
small, fine face of memory,
the sniffing, up-turned nose,
pink on white, of one
who found us,
& left us.