“After Hayden Carruth”

It is not snow on hills, nor
sleeping silence. Your eardrums
beating softly against another’s cheek,
another’s lips, and softly beating.
Nor is it the garden laid to rest there:
the backyard you won’t see again,
the piles left. Weeds. A flannel shirt
buried. Stuff of the mind, the earth.
Rocks for eyes, a heart of twigs, the
mountain lion slowly decomposed
in silence, onto and into rock.
Dust, you say. An old man sleeps like
snow on hills. You turn words to some-
thing else, something which might stand alone.
If you could only hear it.

Jacqueline Winter Thomas (March 23, 1991 – April 18, 2019),

Jacqueline Winter Thomas was an M.F.A. candidate in poetry at UNC Wilmington where she teaches courses in creative writing. Her poems have been published and are forthcoming in Barrelhouse, Eratio, Nude Bruce Review, Trillium, Burningword, and more. She is interested in the convergence of poetics and poststructural semiotics.”