The Gilded Shadow

This poem is for my dear friend, whose father died suddenly this morning.

The Gilded Shadow  

            - Jane Mayhall

The impact is simmering down, as into
a solvent liquid. That I’ll never hear your voice
again, but through a medium like
rain. Or will see you but in a lightning flash.
You are nature’s speech, the young girth
and deadly imprint.

I eagerly wait the date of your rebirth, in
the endless window-sky. Hovering cloud, really a
gilded shadow that lights your face outline. Waters
and land permit no elegy translated.
But a stark villanelle, facts rendered.
An indefinite, glorious seeding,

the element that draws us closest. Nucleus of
a meadow, the grass-tips’ ghost your
being. Bend me to earth, the only hereafter after death.
O shades beneath the sun. Or I don’t understand it —
like embracing a mystery hole in our minds,
this complex, heartbreak survival.