Isabel,

met first through your dark and handsome
Latinate father so strangely
ignorant you were missing,

it was my calling to bear bad news,
muse-like draft the armies
made of no more than two minds:

a father’s mind, my mind
turned to times of a plane’s arrival
since on that plane I knew there came

Isabel herself, the very missing one
not missing at all, and never was (jokes
of Isabel on a bicycle aside)

making no sense, except you’re each
and every doled-out part in the cast
in the play in the dream

of Isabel, our very missing one.
Maybe it was the Argentinian tinge
of the father’s fractured English

or how it was he didn’t know.
Somewhere here’s a duplicitous one.
Still, he wore his worry well

with furrowed brow. We scan
the online schedules, and don’t
those going and gone planes

conjure more of the missing, lost
loved ones. Isabel, I invented you
and I had to save you too.

i.m. Michael Donaghy

Sonneral

(for Sarah Hannah)

Poetry is how we talk to the dead when it’s too late — Ted Hughes

Once the ceremony’s done, the work begins
in fury - in curtained, darkened rooms - my chief
desire here to mine the perfect crime
to fit the punishment, refine the grief

from a wash of mourner faces. Spare me. The words
were so rehearsed, I’ve even lost belief
in mine. Who cares. I’m feeling mean, absurd,
appalled by pretty wreaths and grief beneath

the pond’s gnarled tree. Midnight, I’m back to smash
something. Like your new neighbors’ bas-relief.
They too deserve avengers of the painful lash
that’s not the rain we hardly felt. No common thief
I’ll dig up graves. Some rage should never pass.
It’s irreverence that’s worth you, worth the grief

or maybe just to inhale the box of your ashes,
gift-wrapped, and its taped-on, dried crab-apple leaf.