Everyone’s writing poems for the dead,
those who have gone
missing, those who have gone.
Everyone’s writing poems for the dead

even without meaning to, even unwillingly
we crack the brain’s backdoor
for children, for lovers, who set their door
swinging, who come back, even unwillingly,

to tell us something we think we hear
in her singular smoker’s voice,
when lately we believed in no voice
but our own. We think we hear

her beside us in the kitchen
lifting our hair—see how we’ve brought
her home! see how she’s brought
her cigarette. We breathe in. The kitchen

after this is predictably dark.
Already the visitation is a memory,
already we suspect visitation is only memory
lighting the film in the chamber’s dark.

It’s certainly a flash in our particular brain
that captures our particular other,
her hippocampal polaroid exposed, no other
way to certainly find her. Our painbrain

recalled her, momentarily, exactly.
For a second she was more ours
than she ever really was, entirely ours.
We go on recalling her consciously, inexactly,

to keep her from going again, she who was
(we’d like to believe it) telling us to say
what we came to say:
Don’t go, you who’ve gone. You, who were.