what rituals exist

for a dead language?

 

though I was the killer

I covered my mirrors for weeks

like the Victorians

those masters of grief

owners of tintype stares

and tragic ends

letters kissed closed

with violet, lilac, dead men’s bells:

all the things

 

that made you want

that morbid glamour

made us children

take to pen and post

drawing new bodies

and new verbs to live in them

new mouths to pour forth

our fledgling grammar;

all the things

 

that made you cry

smoothed over then

by better words —

by this vocabulary

that might have stayed

if we were not killers

thinking we could never lose

a long-loved tongue

left fallow in the reams

 

of my unfinished replies

still whispering through

the envelopes

still humming

in our private dialect:

here is everything

that meant something,

 

here are all the things

that made

                   you.