Wake

The casseroles just showed up.
According to her sister a symbolic casting

of the feminine, not gender but physics, dear—
according to a friend she looked

just like her sister, green bathrobe mid-afternoon,
suitcase still in the trunk.

She’d carried him dead for days.
Out above the reeds a sphere of birds

stretches and knots, rises as one
brown then belly-white. Oh the hunger

when it came filled every chair.