Time worked my mother's ashes finer than quarry dust – silt of memory settled on old end tables, lampshades, couches, the hard to clean lattice-work and blinds.
Motes sift through sunlight – I draw my finger across the furniture and bring it to my tongue. Not bitter, but dry: rock, brick. No trace of perfume she wore to dinner parties. The last pack of Marlboros.
When the furnace clarified her cinders – the exhale of her body rising from the chimney in smoke – did cities burn, turning sunsets the color of sorrow?
Were we children made extinct from a comet smashing the world, ejecta of truth blotting out the sun?
Did we pray for mercy and forgiveness to volcanoes, offer ourselves as sacrifice?
How many years do particles of marrow, bleached white, circulate in the jet stream?
Flecks of pistol-blue eyes, iron filings denatured of blood – rivers high above the earth, tributaries splitting and joining, eddies turning above every city that I live.
How long for the sky to thin enough for light to yellow, skin to thicken from salt rain?
The body must breathe the air it finds.
Inhale, hold, exhale. Like a last cigarette.
For Shay’s Word Garden
qbit 
This is poignant, qbit. You show here that you can do poignancy as well as anyone! A perfect poem.
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Thank you, though I just don’t do confessional very well. OK, fine maybe a yeoman effort here, but not my sweet spot.
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Sweet spot, smeet pot! Take a bow and false humidity be damned.
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That is kind of you, but compared to your coffee can poem, this is sort of pale.
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“When the furnace clarified her cinders”
coated with the stark clarity of cremation and ash – the questions are what’s left to make of such an absence. Such a well crafted confessional
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Thank you!!
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p.s. the reader makes it almost impossible to read the preformatted block as it removes punctuation but I prefer to visit anyway
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Good poem really, but actually this poem saddened me. Death of anyone’s mother is hard to read. The details are stark.
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Thank you.
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