After a While, You Win: Death Pastoral

Elena Karina Byrne

Someone else’s child, not you, is running and running

down the beach. Both feet dig into the burning sand.

Two others heave one yellow bucket full of sugar-brown

seaweed, their twin suits flowering

a conflation of pink over blue behind the water. So

landmark cactus and landmine rock battlefield uphill toward

the early moon’s white horse head and each wave collapses to your

right, unsettles, shouting every half minute: have me, shhhh,

have me, shhhh, halve me, shhhh ... its rising fulcrum swell roar

labors — up, down, there, gone, up, down, —

interrogates the island body island floating
   this ghost-wardrobe-ocean.

There are ways one can look, squint into the idyll light, see

nothing exists between its shimmering fractions.

Not even you. Especially not you, the daughter. Your tulip-gasp face

rising from the heat, turned sideways, looking

for her amidst too many bodies, calling for her,

“Mom,” “Mom!” “Mother,” “Mother!” “Mom!” all other

bodies thrown and going on without you, the bodies a testimony

to being bodies relative to desire on the decomposing sand, or laid

out on the table in the room, marked out on the glass atlas,

laid out under the god sun where “Marcia!” is the only
name above ground she would recognize.