Son's Chapel Cemetery, Fayetteville

I unfurled your country's flag for you, brought it in when the Arkansas thunderstorms shook my teeth. I saved it under the quilts while my sister's and my nightgowns sparked with static electricity. My nose bled until the blood turned black and each drop of morphine I put down your throat choked us both. My words now, useless, though you'd told me that day in 1981-- pulling the unwanted hibiscus with a chain and a borrowed truck--you told me I had a way with words. You had work gloves on, I sat in the back of the truck, pale, blue-veined hands tucked in my lap. My love of metaphor before I knew it was metaphor.

Flags and hands and words and hibiscus and morphine knock together in my head that September while your fingernails slowly turn blue. I am bleeding all over my words- hating their inadequacy, hating how you will never smell an uprooted Arkansas hibiscus again. I lack the vocabulary to inhabit this space in this house on this week, so sometimes I run down the sidewalk to Dickson Street, my feet making the noise for me. I smell burning leaves. The fossils in the drawers cracking in pieces. The jams down in the cellar turning bloody colors. The words you've written on whiteboards in the sickroom forming shapes out of silence. They call out, mute.

I am caught somewhere between two cold countries, misprouncing the easiest of words. I smell everything more distinctly now, as if my way with words is now a way with smelling. It's a burden to have such a well-developed talent for smelling turned earth, the metal of blood, the sweet decay of blooming Bradford pear trees from one hundred and ninety miles away. But you cared only for words, even when the tangle of disease dipped its thin and pale fingers into the smallest, softest parts of your mind. I look now for a flag to mark my country, to find out what new language I must learn. Your blond grandbabies sing over your gravestone while the March wind blows through leafless oaks. I was always the one. It was always me. Sing when you can't speak, let me warm your hands.