into grief told Violet about the moment his mother died, unbeautifully

pulling at air with a picture of her children on her chest, in silver,

or perhaps I imagined that part. Her works of art, he said, there was a mask

he grew into, he said, and he cried for twenty minutes into her unyielding body after it broke

apart from all the twenty things he couldn’t say when she was supple.

I wondered where death started, exactly, in her body,

whether knowing could show me where to find mine.

Rose said he found death a second time at the base of his tongue, upgraded

against the medical imagining tuned to a different organ,

and I wondered whether her artwork was the picture or the placenta

she ate, maybe

threw away. I wondered whether Scarlet had it on his calendar to come bear

witness, if not the frame, and how I might search for air in my own way

when the time comes, when

Lake St. Clair is clear of this fog

changing, remembering the line in Children of Men

about the inner ear cells dying, a far away tintinnabulation.