There was a canal outside the city where we would go with cookies some afternoons after school had released us. Watch the boats glide past the steep bank, press down among the long grasses—brittle spun gold—punctuated by poppies

She is not the same anymore

Neither the woman on the canal nor the one in the hospital bed

She has been set free

And I feel the silence

A migratory grief

Sometimes in the head, other times

the heart