To My Living Wife

By Sarah Anderson

I did not know how to be dead at the beginning. Someone came to tell you right before our child was born. The airplane crashing, the force, they must have said.

No sign of the plane, only a glistening Chesapeake Bay. You are too empty to forgive me. I shout at the asphalt the wheels never hit.

My love, a crippled animal hides itself, heals itself alone. I see you have joined the fog, chestnut tree, November. The branches have what they need. To forgive me, the water, the accident.

My great uncle served on the USS Intrepid and was chief experimental test pilot at Chance Vought Aircraft in the late 1940’s. He was killed flying an XF7U-1

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