Sunday
The mirror on her white dressing table
tinged with pink
reflects the sultry sky of an endless
afternoon for those of the living.
From stone towers the transparency of time
bells outward in the color of air, drifting,
alighting at the tip of the white steeple just up
the alley from the dumpster at the edge of the crumbling asphalt
behind the old Victorian, to which for six days
the gray-haired son hauled furniture:
chairs in weeds arranged for conversation
the card table proffering the tooled leather box: “important papers”
filled with polished stones, while beneath the ledgers and broken table legs
on the floor of the dumpster lay two pavers
rectangular and flat of white marble.
Layer upon layer, a fine opaque compression
like an ultimate thickening of Sundays from all her years:
four thousand six hundred and eighty eight.