Passage

I died in a car crash two days ago
 Was unrecognizable
 When they pulled me from the gears
 No one's fault, no one's bottle
 No one's teenage pride or throttle
 Our innocence is all the worse for fears
 The other walked away alive
 Arms wrapped now around his wife
 My lover sits, the silent eye
 In a hurricane of warmth and word
 My mother trembles with the sobs
 Whose absence seems absurd
 My sister shouts to let her see
 Through the cloud of crowd surrounding me
 My colleagues call for silence in my name
 I died in a car crash three months ago
 They burned me 'til I glowed
 And crumbled to a fine gray sand
 Now I am nothing, everywhere
 Several breaths of strangers' air
 And all thoughts ever written in my hand
 They plant my tree out in the yard
 It grows but takes the winter hard
 My lover puts a knife to wrist
 Says tomorrow comes, hold on a while
 My mother tosses in the sheets
 And dreams me holding my own child
 My sister plays our homemade tapes
 Laughs as tears stream down her face
 My office door now bears a different name
 I died in a car crash four years ago
 My tree drinks melted snow
 Just eight feet tall a pale and fragile thing
 Bee stings, beaches, bright vacations
 Sunburnt high-school graduations
 A sparrow healing from a broken wing
 This year a glimpse of second chances
 Tiny apples on my tree's branches
 My lover hears the open wind
 And crawls blinking into the sun
 My mother leafs through photographs
 And thinks, "Yes, she was a lovely one."
 My sister can't decide her truth
 Asks aloud what I might do
 In a conference hall my brief efforts engraved
 I died in a car crash
 A lifetime ago it seems
 Been a decade or two or three
 They've just released a new design
 Bars and bags front and behind
 My fate now an impossibility
 Safely packaged hurtling down
 The highway hardly make a sound
 My lover very much alive
 Arms wrapped now around his wife