The Goodbye

No smile or words. Rigid, unyielding,

for that last photograph.

His arm, slack, around my shoulder. I turn from the shot.

Hide my tears, knowing he wants to be gone.

That final blurred image, shutting the car door.

I stumble through weeks of white-hot fury and freezing fear,

invent a radio-crackling theatre of desert and dazzling stars.

Here, rain and sleet turn to numbing snow.

All is blanched bedlam in the headlong rush to Christmas,

trudging across slush-stubbled fields of rotting crops under a vacant sky.

I flinch as a muffled shotgun rings over crow-huddled woods.

Will him alive, to live.

To bring him home in one piece,

braced for that body I made and witnessed, signed easily away.