By Susan Browne

A woman was killed by a car as she jogged across an intersection.
A friend of hers I play tennis with said, “Can you believe it?”

I put my arms around her as we stood on the court & she cried into my shoulder.
I didn’t tell her my mother died in a car crash after buying towels on sale.

You’d think we’d be used to death coming out of the blue like lightning
striking on a sunny day, but we’re always surprised.

Then my mother’s accident became a story I told so many times
as if that could bring her back. The story was like the St. Christopher medal

tucked safely in her purse that a policeman found in the middle of the freeway
& that I carried in my pocket until who knows what happened to it.

I traveled all over Europe & even went to a place, if you can believe it,
The End of the World in Southern Portugal on the Vicentine Coast,

stood on cliffs 200 feet high & looked at what explorers thought was the edge
of the flat earth & I could understand why.

I was thousands of miles from home wandering beaches & piers, going into stone
churches when no one was there, lighting candles although my belief in God flitted

around like a bat in the rafters before it folded its wings & disappeared in the darkness.
At night in my hostel room, I ate sardines out of the tin & read the Tao Te Ching,

staining the pages with red wine & oil. The idea of the Tao was consoling:
An empty container that can never be emptied & can never be filled.

Darkness within darkness, the gateway to all understanding.
What in the world did that mean,

but it was like a kind of hope without hope so I could believe it.
A man I dated once or twice in California came to visit.

We had a beautiful time in bed. He was confused when, after a week,
I wanted him to leave. At the airport I apologized & kissed him goodbye

& we kept kissing. He said, “Why am I leaving, I can’t believe this.”
A few years later I realized it was because no one he loved had died.

The universe is forever out of control. The world is sacred.
I went to see my father.

In the restaurant the dining room was dark even though it was lunchtime,
the little candle on the table trying hard.

It had been over a year since we’d seen each other or talked or talked about her.
My father’s eyes were sober & clear. He said, “How’s the sandwich?”

We were surrounded by velvet paintings on the walls of the hobo clown,
Emmett Kelly, his red nose, his sad mouth, his crushed bowler hat.

In one of the paintings a monarch butterfly rested on the hat’s brim. I decided
to take that as a sign for whatever—whether I could believe it or not—happened next.

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Susan Browne is the author of the poetry collections Buddha’s Dogs (Four Way Books, 2004), Zephyr (Steel Toe Books, 2010), and Just Living (Catamaran Literary Reader, 2019). Monster Mash is forthcoming from Four Way Books. She lives in Northern California. http://www.susanbrownepoems.com