Stumbling through the dust of cremation bones I dream of rivers rolling wide and green and deep – time is an abstraction – you walk beside me in rhythm from another age, our words carried on the wet wind to the underworld. My life is as small and tenuous as a drop of dew suspended in a spider’s web. A dragonfly lives only four months, when lucky; we shake our heads at the shortness of their lives, just as the stars pity us our brief, human days on earth. What good is this next breath without you? I want to roll down the muddy Mississippi to the ocean suspended in the cool bubbles churned under a sternwheeler, my existence no more significant than a raindrop, sorrow drifting like perfume from a magnolia flower, your laughter ringing in my head, the melody from the neighborhood ice cream truck fading steadily down the block.

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