Elegy for Grace Paley

I.

The day of her death was not a dark cold day:
It was the end of summer, and the roads leaked
heat by noon because of the dewy night
and the humid morning.

The town was crowded, and sidewalks full;
pigeons congregated on the corner of Main and Railroad
not doing anything, but you would have noticed them.

You meddled with the mundane, the simple,
yet the voices of thousands bubbled
up through the ink and they spoke
their silences; you used that pen of yours

the black one, as if it were your third lung; you used it to collect
all the life you could. You used it because you knew
you had to. But it doesn’t matter, because few speak
your name; the pigeons don’t care if you notice them.

The sun pulled sweat
from our foreheads that day,
as on every other August day.
You slid from the world quietly,

and the shift in the balance was delicate,
too fine to notice.

II.

What is left, before yielding
to the bitter autumn air,
is a sweetness on the tip of your tongue
when you suck in the last of the summer humidity:
A tender, simple aftertaste.
you can miss it if you breathe
too quickly, and swallow too harshly.
Grace caught the seasons
In her mouth, and mulled
them slowly, savoring each taste
so that she wouldn’t miss a thing
offered to her in this world,
so she would learn to love it all.