On the balcony of the rich woman, life is about wonder at this moon rise,
orange, over mountains, city, and salt bay. It is about all death,
and her father’s lost ashes, and crying to her husband where the world
may witness that her riches are dollars and vistas and sorrows. Life
has always been about the non-rhyming guise of orange, purses filled
versus empty pockets, our fathers’ deaths and the disposition
of their ashes (divide? ignore? sprinkle in the Teton Range of his hiking youth?),
always, about heights of balconies peering over homes or worlds
where only low yards and air stirred at last memory,
and who is witness and who records the rich woman crying on her balcony
at this looming moon (lopped, gibbous, orange), looming as it will — as laws
of matter and energy say moons must loom, and, in the middle of the night,
glow back the sun. She cries
because she knows it’s about a grand scheme of nothingness,
inevitability of ashes, and the vast open everything of now.
