For Lorena

Once, while speaking with me
of a recently deceased mutual friend,
Lorena said,

“I have never stopped speaking
to anyone who has died; that would be rude,
don’t you think?  I find the dead to be cordial
and content with their new lives
and indeed, seem to feel that
there has been no interruption worthy
of the name; who am I to mourn those
who feel no pain in their own passing?”

I looked at her, so
ordinary, so calm, sipping coffee
as if it were the most normal thing
in the world to talk this way
of communing with the afterlife,

and it all seemed possible,
even probable, at least on that morning
in June, a few months before she herself
died quite peacefully in her sleep,
before we laid her away in a floral dress
and went back to our own lives.

Shortly thereafter, over coffee (again),
the two of us sat in our customary seats
and spoke as if there had been
no intervening passage for one of us,
and I poured her cup after cup as always
while we looked out over the lake

and discussed the nature of light
and its persistence, how it would change
during a day,

how it can play and shift itself
through the laurels and over the granite ledges
and yet retain the same intangible quality
of being “light,”

how it keeps faith with us
and never completely leaves us,
even on a moonless, starless night.