Evanescence

For Hope

I want to give you a word,
evanescent, because your vocabulary
for grief is being forced wider.

I could come up with more useful words,
rubbery and dull, lamentable
comes to mind.

But I crave gifts this week
in the wake of the death
of your friend Raven’s boyfriend

Eli, the beautiful lost in the beautiful.
Evanescent, a word Emily Dickinson
favored, as she did transmogrify.

What a year, two grandmas, twin towers,
My friend in the Rio Grande, now this.
So I offer a word for dragonflies

And all things vaporous and tending
To vanish. My mother never needed
this word her whole life

She had Hungarian and the Great
Depression. She said, “Thank you
Sweetheart,” in Hungarian every day.

You need this word, fleeting
in your brevity and shimmer,
you with your sixteen summer beauty.

In the wake of college board scores,
iridescence, running hurdles, all of it,
evanescence comes along.

Here. Take this word
And make the most of it.