Diane Furtney

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The Afterlife

In memory of my sister, a nonsmoker who died young of lung
cancer, and to a friend who mentioned, after her father's
accident, 'I hate it, death. Everything's over, you just stop.
It's as if you never lived.'

I've signed revised documents
creating bequests, spoken with a development

officer for a bench and inscription at a school
in Pennsylvania, heard from a man who'll

build a nesting box, front-lettered 'Gayle, '
for bluebirds in his woods near Hale,

Indiana, and I've been made aware,
abruptly, of some family facts, all dark, all austere

but useful—new events that wouldn't be the case,
or intricately connect, if it were still the case

that my desperate, dear sister were alive. An insect,
lovely, its dorsal wings blue-shellacked,

can lower and lift those wings
once or twice on a stem at a turning

of the Orinoco, and within a week
hurricane winds can be about to peak

in the mid-Atlantic. What also happens
—maybe with equal accumulation and extent? —

to those receiving the award
you're funding in your father's name; to hard,

fast breezes across the hemispheres
from blue-winged birds, new every year;

or to young women
reading on a teak bench soon,

at a college, under beech-leaf drop,
when any small wings hesitate, then stop?

In SCIENCE AND, FutureCycle Press, copyright © 2014 Diane Furtney

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