David Dodd Lee

Wind Shift

I shower the grit away
like the make-up
off a corpse.
I thought I was only thirty
a few minutes ago but I was
wrong. At the viewing
the distance between me and the deceased
was alarming.
I thought of bees
thriving inside
a cave
or audible through the wood
of a hollow tree. You know
the single insect that gets
separated—furious—from the hive,
how it walks down the driveway
beating
its transparent wings? I thought
my friend’s brother deserved
better than the standard
funeral décor. It rained while
I was indoors
but there was sunlight when I exited
the funeral parlor—
the blush of ammonia,
the clouds to the west…
At home,
later that afternoon,
I turned off the ballgame
and everyone I’d ever known
who was no more
became part of what the wind
was doing to the trees
outside
which I couldn’t hear at all
until I opened the door

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David Dodd Lee is the author of eleven books of poetry, including Animalities (Four Way Books, 2014) and Orphan, Indiana (University of Akron Press, 2010), as well as a forthcoming book of collages, erasure poems and original poems, entitled Unlucky Animals. His poems most recently have appeared in New Ohio Review, Ocean State Review, Guesthouse, Copper Nickel, TriQuarterly, The Nation and Willow Springs. He writes and makes visual art and kayaks in Northern Indiana, where he lives on the St. Joseph River. He is Associate Professor of English at Indiana University South Bend, where he is also Editor-in-Chief of 42 Miles Press, as well as the online literary magazine The Glacier.