Gone Drinking

My daughter woke me one morning in tears. Her best friend had gone drinking and crashed her car into a tree. She hit at 90 miles an hour. Nothing but a leg was left to identify. Her boyfriend was ruined beyond repair. Shortly afterward I went to the Blue Ridge Mountains for a week's solitary work. When I sat down in front of my computer, I found that I could only mourn. By the time I left, I had the first draft of "Night Huntress," a narrative prose poetry collection dealing with grief, loss and resolution.

They have all come, the friends of the dead girl and the ruined boy. Even the busboy from the nightclub has come, his face ashen with responsibility. They have brought flowers with them. They hold them in their hands. "Ashes to ashes," says the priest, and, "dust to dust." The flowers surge into the sunlight. They eddy at the surface of the dug red grave, as though the air inside is too dense for them to fall, or perhaps reluctant. Then, like feathers from a broken pillow, they slide sideways down onto the coffin.

They are white, these flowers, white lilies -- lily of tapestry, lily of ancient kings, I am the lily of the valleys -- the coffin burdened and burdened with their whiteness. White for purity, for innocence, for hope, although there is none. It is too late now. The day is hot, the flowers already withering.

The priest cries out to heaven, crying for comfort, crying for mercy, for the soul of the dead, for the soul of the boy still living, but it does no good. This Oh Lord, Oh God, Oh Jesus Our Sweet Christ is a hard-hearted fellow, hot for sacrifice, lips soft and flexible, ready to draw back above the wolfish snarl, the lion's ripping teeth. Even the dove pecks sharply with no mercy. The god's hunger must be stanched, the bloody gullet filled.

The dark girl. The laughing boy. The stilled voice.

Crows sit in the trees. They are like professional mourners with their black robes and their harsh cracked voices and simulated grief. One of the boys goes to stand under a tree, looking about him for a stone, but the graveyard is fastidiously cared for, not a stone in sight that does not bear a name. So he takes off his shoe, with the liturgy behind him, and flings it up into the tree, and the crows rise in a great black clatter, big as dogs, barking and rushing back and forth, as though the casting of the shoe has broken up the tree itself, and it has risen in a rage.