Waiting Brown Waters

Waiting Brown Waters

We carry her ashes to the tannic lake in a hard
cardboard box lined with foil and smelling faintly
of smoke when she once wore the scent of cinnamon
from the cider she mulled with her homegrown pears
for the young red-haired son who played in
her blooming garden by the waiting brown waters.

One of us brings a trowel she'd painted with daisies,
later hidden behind a curio chest where we found it,
remembering her red-haired son holding the handle
like a gun he pretended to shoot, yet other times
he was just a child with a small shovel digging
in loose garden loam by the waiting brown waters.

We mean to use the trowel to disperse her ashes
as if our bare fingers would disgrace those remains,
dust as dolorous as the cold tannic lake we approach
with slowing steps, the same lake where years before
she carried her red-haired son's ashes through
her wilding garden to cast in the waiting brown waters.

Perhaps there will be a unity of souls, this forgiven
red-haired son, grown to be a killer and to be killed,
with the mother who could never salvage herself,
instead starving in slow, cruel years until too thin
to stand upright amidst the stinging nettles in her
abandoned garden near the waiting brown waters.

At sunset, we gather to scatter her remains
into the tannic lake with hopes of that unity for her
and the red-haired son. But as we cast her dust, a
sudden easterly breeze blows the trowel scoop of
ash back to land as if her choice is to lie in the
ruined garden instead of the waiting brown waters.