The Farm

And there you are, the last pin-up, in your stockings and fur coat,
your pale face gorgeous with mischief, tarty. You were December.
Remember the farm, in December?
a junked car hood for a sled, being yanked through
the dead white field behind the pick-up,
the iced air summoning blood to our cheeks...
I associate you with velocity:
your skiing, your lead foot (taking out a mailbox while fixing your lipstick),
the way you piled a lifetime into 24 years.
As stunning as you were, you didn’t make a pretty corpse:
the windshield bruise, the draining coma,
they did your hair wrong, the dress was frowzy,
and worst of all, Natalie, they farmed you—
plucking organs from you before you were cold.
A letter they sent your mother lists
what they used and couldn’t use, what part went to whom
in what neighboring town.
Economics pollutes everything.
The haggling with the funeral home.
That soloist who couldn’t sing beautifully.
A bogus diamond on your earlobe, fodder for the coffin robber at the wake,
a boyfriend.
And now, in this new December,
A vision haunts me:
Your mother wanders some hardware store
(a chandelier fell, she needs some wire)
when she spots a stranger, and although he is wholly unremarkable,
she is attracted, filled with ache.
She follows him, forgetting her shopping
She heads him off in automotive
and stares—he looks back dully—until it hits her:
You have my daughter's eyes