When the Music Ends
By Barbara Daniels
Years after your death a magazine
emailed: “We want you back, Viola.”
Today, a little morning rain. You told me
before you met Dad you walked sedately
past the bank where he worked, turned
the corner, took off your shoes, and ran.
Why he married you: that blazing hair.
When I looked like an egg, no eyebrows,
no lashes, some people laughed at me.
Just last night a waitress said, “Sorry, sir,”
mistaking my tousled hair and androgynous
shirt. My streaming service wrote me:
“When your music ends, we will continue
to play music you should like.” Hair
doesn’t grow in the grave, but it should,
shouldn’t it? As you were dying, your friend
said, “You have the best hair in the building.”
Still red in your ninety-ninth year. When I die,
my atoms could leap into fingers and feet.
I might be somebody’s shining hair. It’s raining,
but softly. Mahler’s third symphony plays.
Barbara Daniels’s Rose Fever was published by WordTech Press and her chapbooks Moon Kitchen, Black Sails and Quinn & Marie by Casa de Cinco Hermanas Press. She received three Individual Artist Fellowships from the New Jersey State Council on the Arts and earned an MFA in poetry at Vermont College.