Cloud Anchor

You and you. You take two.

You watch a cloud shaped like

A ship’s anchor float past

The car’s opened sunroof

And think of you, and that

Becomes you, ghost anchor.

You were so graceful then,

Already half-addict,

Half-tragic, too slender

To be any anchor,

And now you weigh nothing,

Have been nothing but ash

And memory for years,

For more than a decade.

You lost all your daughters.

True, you chose to lose them,

But if people can say,

Piously, little ones

Are better in heaven,

Then why can’t they accept

You knew they would be, too,

And, in the end, you would

Be, too, as you are now,

Floating on, less than cloud.

You never lived to know,

But as ghost you anchored

Your memory and ash

And sentiment, yes, and

All of your losses, too.

Sometimes you still miss you,

But any ghost you know

Can only be a part

Of you reminding you,

To say “you” to a lost

thing in a poem is to

acknowledge the thing, to

keep it around for as

long as it needs to be

around, and to bid it

goodbye when you’re ready—

whether it has ever

existed at all. You.