Today we buried a friend from work who died suddenly during a short fierce fight with cancer, just after her fiftieth birthday.

So, for Lucy, who loved her life:

Remember the sage and wild thyme nagging their sandals,
the stones and sand underfoot the carriers
who held your body vertically and placed it
under rock to hold back the natural world.

Remember those who held you and hold you still,
walk with you in their hearts. Piero
brings you back triumphant, stick in hand
above the sleeping soldiers who guard you

if only in dream. The Artist imparts
hues of the good earth, earth of the Renaissance
to locate the moment of your reappearance.
The Poet takes you off the rock and down

into the valley with the heat of primary color,
raiment of wild flowers. And the valley
bears wild flowers that no longer
draw blood from your ankles. The poet

Machado wrote of your second journey,
There is no road walker, you make the road
by walking. By walking you make the road,
and when you look backward you see the path

that you never will step on again.
And when you've crossed the fields fired
with wild flowers, you do not look back
but come to an eddy and there find,

held over the swirling water, a temple
where your first woman of this flesh
lights candles in her window at sundown.
Does she await your arrival? The cliffs

so steep here, the wind so like her
fierce breathing, so close to your own
breathing. Now you stand above the shore
on these green mountains, the way back overgrown.

The guards awaken but no longer
have the will to pursue you. You reside
in the house of women, where the Poets
are free to come and go. Li Po counsels,

there is another heaven and earth
beyond the world of men. At sunset you walk
to the water's edge. The chilly waves
collapse at your feet and above a woman

sets a table for two, a table where bread
is not of the body but warm precursor
to the evening meal and wine no longer
the body's life fluid but something of the earth

given back, something deeply red, something
pleasant to pour into a terra-cotta cup
and simply drink for the pure pleasure
of sharing one thing with another.