| In October 2015, I was out in the yard
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| I’d just finished splitting up the scrap two-by-fours into kindling
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| I glanced up at the half-moon, pink, chill refinery cloud light
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| Two big black birds flew over, their wings whooshing and low
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| Two ravens, but only two
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| Their black feathers tinted in the sunset
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| I knew these birds were omens but of what I wasn’t sure
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| They were flying out toward the island where we hoped to move
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| You were probably inside, you were probably aching, wanting not to die
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| Your body transformed
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| I couldn’t bear to look so I turned my head west, like an early death
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| Now I can only see you on the fridge in lifeless pictures
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| And in every dream I have at night, and in every room I walk into
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| Like here, where I sit the next October, still seeing your eyes
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| Pleading and afraid, full of love
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| Calling out from another place, because you’re not here
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| I watched you die in this room, then I gave your clothes away
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| I’m sorry, I had to, and now I’ll move
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| I will move with our daughter
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| We will ride over water
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| With your ghost underneath the boat
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| What was you is now burnt bones
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| And I cannot be at home
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| I’m running, grief flailing
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| The second time I went to Haida Gwaii was just me and our daughter
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| Only one month after you died, my face was still contorted
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| Driving up and down, boots wet inside, aimless and weeping
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| I needed to return to the place where we discovered that childless,
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| we could blanket ourselves in the moss there for our long lives
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| But when we came home, you were pregnant
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| And then our life together was not long;
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| You had cancer and you were killed and I’m left living like this
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| Crying on the logging roads with your ashes in a jar
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| Thinking about the things I’ll tell you
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| When you get back from wherever it is that you’ve gone
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| But then I remember death is real
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| And I’m still here in Masset, it’s August 12th, 2016
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| You’ve been dead for one month and three days, and we are sleeping in the forest
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| There is sand still in the blankets from the beach
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| Where we released you from the jar
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| When we wake up, all the clothes that we left out are cold and damp just from
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| the air permeating, the ground opens up
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| Surrounded by growth; |
| nurse logs with layers of moss and life
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| Young cedars, the sound of water, thick salal, and god-like huckleberries
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| The ground absorbs and remakes whatever falls, nothing dies here
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| But here is where I came to grieve, to dive into it with you, with your absence,
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| but I keep picking you berries |