The New Ash on the Roof of our Building

Haunted is an apartment where a woman lived.
Someone like your wife, or soon-to-have-been-ex-wife.
Do people even say such things?

Haunted is an apartment where a woman died.
Except instead of the apartment,
it’s the sidewalk outside six floors below,

the place where later candles and flowers
bloomed into a shrine of glitter and photographs,
pretty colored stones, and a carved wooden box.

We think of the dead as faded floating versions
of who they were in life—same grief, same need,
ghostly, doleful, disconsolate transparency,

except wearing sheets like gods, wraiths, or Romans—
maybe even Roman gods—revenants.
Do people even say such things?

I commit this notion to the earth with all the dead
flowers, pictures of you, haunted stones, and guilt.
I bury the carved wooden box like ashes.

I planted a flower in an open field
not far from my own grave, haunted,
except instead of a flower, it was a tree.

And instead of an open field,
it was the rooftop of our building.
And instead of my grave, it was yours.