At the cemetery where my mother is buried, I lean

back against the rain-slicked granite and close my eyes, starlings

circling overhead. This is as close to her as I can feel, my hair splayed like

deciduous branches across the letters of her name, the dark

etching that shows what years she lived. Her gravestone is her

face, cold and wet with tears. On nice days, when the sun

goes behind a cloud, I imagine she is shutting her eyes to whiff

heliotropes, almond-scented and white—one of her favorites if

I remember correctly. Or hyacinth. Or hollyhock. It’s unfair that I can’t

just ask her, though I have learned to open sadness like a wet umbrella—

katydids singing asynchronously, iron gates, rain boots mud-caked, grief

like a cloak with a neck-hole I can’t fit my head through. I was prepared for  

misfortune—not for how hard it would be to convert the verbs to past tense.

Nobody taught me to say lived, not live. Loved, not love. At her funeral, I wanted to

open her casket and fill it with verbs in the present tense, a thousand

pieces of paper: make, think, say, feel, want, give, stay, stay, stay. As if the

quantity would make them true. Instead, I’m left with blank pages, words

resting in peace, a mother who isn’t returning to discuss the parts of

speech. My life is a sentence that can’t be diagrammed and I’m gritting

teeth. Dirt caked in my fingernails. I want. I wanted. I asked the

undertaker to make my face like hers. I lipsticked and eyeshadowed. I action

verbed. I disappeared behind a cloud, heliotroped and hyacinthed.

We hollyhocked. I read her name backward and it spelled

xiphoid—I could feel each letter swell in my chest as if I’d inhaled it.

Your mother loved you, said my dad, burying himself in whiskey. I funeraled a

zillion verbs, buried them so deep—I’ve already forgotten what they were.

From my bedroom ceiling, I would display my longing—

my heart, suspended, a knotted macramé of longing.

In my dream, we slow-dance to a fast song in a cemetery.

Eternal, he calls me—though my sobriquet is Longing.

The radiologist places a heavy shield over me and says

stay still, then reads the results of my x-ray: longing.

I press dried forget-me-nots into a book of love poems

and leave it on his doorstep—a bouquet of longing.

On the phone, my words tremble like telephone wires

in the wind—I am afraid of this faraway longing.

He removes the cutlass from its sheath, steel glimmering,

my tears glittering—oh—this swordplay of longing.

I go out with a lantern searching for him, but he eludes me.

Amorphous—a spine with no vertebrae, longing.

I follow Red Giants, Pulsars, Carbon Stars, Luminous

Blue Variables—but tonight, I am led astray by longing.

How sweet he is, like a hotel pillow chocolate. (Sigh!)

Thoughts of him give me tooth decay—longing.

As a scholar of heartache, I know how to obey longing—

I wrote for weeks, then titled my essay Longing.

He calls my name—Sarah—but I can’t see him. He is down

on the landing, and I am forever up the stairway, longing.

It was there in the bathroom sink, my tears cupped in its porcelain palm. Bubbling up in the suds. There, drowning in the saturated cornfields. Flying like a wandering albatross through a bottle-green sky. I said my dead friend’s name and it turned to vapor inside my mouth. It was there in my fourth-grade journal, where I drew a green circle and wrote: everyone belongs inside. There, in the red dust when the rover circled and circled and found no evidence of life. I circled and circled, my pointer finger extended as if I were scrolling down a list of words in the dictionary, looking for the right one. Absence—no. Emptiness—no. Ghost—no. Grief—no. Not quite. I blew into an empty wine bottle so I could hear the ocean. I wanted to find my dead friend buried in the sand like an abalone shell. I circled and circled, holding a stick, lashing at the air like a piñata, expecting my sadness to spill all over the ground. And there it was: sweet jelly inside a strawberry candy. Hydrangeas like fat, purple storm clouds. There it was. The sky opened like a casket and out flew the birds, singing.