Dear Dorothy – grey clouds are
apt today here in Summertime.
Your body is still above ground.
To end novels is one thing: planned,
edited. Not life. My wife is
inside the hospital now where
they are scanning her breasts.
Brings me back to reality, if I
ever left it. Light rain falls. I lean on a railing
and watch the river ripple. In the halls
of academe and in the literary press, they'll speak
of your writing as 'her work', complete,
reading meaning into its inconclusiveness.
Friends will file away
your ironic smile with your titles.
Rain falls heavier now, hailstones
ping off cars below. My mind shrugs:
questions of mortality are
stale. If we could rewrite
your final pages, we would,
we would.