Petrified

---

If your best friends,
the loved ones
you'd grown up with,

vanished suddenly,
dead of unnatural causes,
would you understand it?
Would your face
like my father's face

that started dying
years ago,
the one side stone cold,
from the palsy,

left eye, left mouth fishhooked
and pulled downward,
would your face
like my father's
go numb,

go cold as the glaciers
his eyes
are becoming?

Would your heap
of a heart
stall each time
you recalled

the girl-next-door
her thick hair
black as the circle
at the center

of your eye,
glistening?
She sees her image
in a window

of the barracks
her head newly shaven
her bare neck
so long, so

monstrous she doesn’t
even know herself
and throws herself
(her arms wide open

as if to gather a lover)
into the current
coursing through
the live gray fence.