Strict Ruling

by Judith Skillman

Leave your dead behind.
Go without memory
Into the future, its hour
Shining like suns
Through pinholes of leaves.

Abandon your father, your mother,
Grandfather, and grandmother.
The sister who died of pneumonia
Or pancreatic cancer, the one
Whose heart simply quit

In the middle of the night,
As if dying were easy.
Forget about the cousin
Crushed by a semi at the age of nine
while riding on her new pink bicycle.

Depart from the other
Sixteen year old cousin killed
By a sixteen-year old driver
In a sports car when he rode
Along in the passenger seat.

Slip out by another exit,
Arrive beside the pond
Of Thoreau’s fragrant imagination.
Dwell in a treatise on nature—
A cabin with an open door

To mimic the fourth wall,
Through which the departed
Slip even as you eat a late meal
Or practice a stringed instrument
Whose difficulties you will never overcome.