Gray Memorial

Morning rain has combed the flags to thread.
The street lies gray beneath a lowered sky.
No brass declares what cannot be repaired.
No drum improves the silence of the dead.

They were not marble when the morning closed.
They had the ordinary weight of names,
Soap on their knuckles, letters in their coats,
A pocket comb, a nickel, one spare match,
One thought of home and did not finish it.
One heard rain tapping through a foreign roof.
One saw a sleeve, a boot, a strip of earth,
And then no more. The body kept its fact.
His wristwatch went on ticking past his pulse.
Their final breath became another’s dawn.

Here, years away, a girl unhooks her bike
And wheels it through the puddles toward the store.
She knows the rain, the curb, the open door,
Not whose stopped heart has left her room to move.
She passes under awnings, dry and free,
Free as her wet shoes squeaking on the tile,
As coins are counted, bread is brought back warm.

And in a closet, after all these years,
The boots remain, brown leather cracked with age,
Their laces stiff, their eyelets dulled to green.
They keep the shape of feet that did not come
Back through the kitchen door at supper time.
Tonight the rain finds one loose pane and falls
In drops along the toe of the right boot.
No speech can make that darkening complete
Or lighter. Rain remembers with its weight.
The leather drinks. The house grows stiller still