What I Did With Your Ashes

Shook the box like a maraca. Stood around like a dope in my punch-colored dress, clutching your box to my chest. Opened your plastic receptacle, the size of a jack-in-the-box. But instead of gaudy stripes, your box is sober-suit blue, hymnal blue. Tasted them. You've gained a statue's flavor, like licking the pyramids, or kissing sandstone shoulders. I mean boulders. Remarked to your box: "REINCARNATION comes from roots meaning 'to be made flesh again.'" Stowed your box under my bed for a week to seed dreams in which you advise me. (This didn't work.) Opened the Babylonian Talmud at random. Read aloud to your gritty, gray-white powder: "There are three keys which the Holy One, blessed be He, has not entrusted into the hands of any messenger. These are: the key of rain, the key of birth, and the key of the resurrection of the dead." Worked myself up to watery eyes. Any intensity evaporated the instant I stopped reading. Tried to intuit your format, sift it from tides of void. Does shape play a role? My watch ticked in an exaggerated way. Closed my eyes, sent forth mental tendrils seeking the nothing of you. They curled back on them- selves, weaving around the wing chair, a dog's leg, a lamp stand, eventu- ally heading back toward the nothing of me.