by Catherine Stearns

Undone

by animal pain, hospital visions, the heroin-gun,

and now the blunting postponement

of endless grief. Even your beloved books

don’t know what to say to you. Condolences

stick to the page, some bit of food or dust

shuts up the words you’d thought of as your life.

Bridge therapy has not yet begun, and

what will a service mean without belief?

“My son,

my beautiful son, who barely made it through

high school, was a self-taught scholar,

an expert on the music from ’65 to ’73.

He knew more about The Drifters, The Stones,

Dylan, Hendrix, The Who—

more about Motown—than anyone knew.”

Catherine Stearns has poems recently published in Southwest Review, North American Review, and Yale Review, among other journals. She lives in Natick, Massachusetts, and is now writer-in-residence at The Roxbury Latin School in Boston.