Soloing

                       For Mackenzie, who sang a bird to heaven once 
                       and made us all sing with her…

She mourned first
the loss of his finger
now vanished at first joint,
startled at the spray,
in the wake of the splendid
grafitti writ red across blue walls.
 
The bullet nestled
fleshy
in the feathers
which held her hair,
traveled almost
through her hair
which escaped golden, yet flecked-
floating free of the scream beginning
and not
ending. Stephen
 
began the vanishing
mouth against o
liquid finger over trigger,
and such accidents remain
like clear bottles under beds and
sisters cooking red soup-
 
inexplicable. When raggedy mourning
patches into breath
until the words won’t come,
the last bits are chipped
Stephen
from and into dated granite-
roughly permanent
against the golden feathers
of her grief pillowed hair. 
 

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