Hours after My Grandfather’s Funeral

I swung arm over arm
at a light pole. My hands
came away in gashes.

A spider’s web landed
on my sleeve, and I caught
the spider in my palm, put
an end to its spiral down

from light. Simple things.
I was not fighting. The rain
was a small one.

The spider crept
up my arm, gathered a strand
of its fallen web,
another, rounded them into a ball.
I counted the seconds

between lightning strikes, counted
poles lining the street.
Lit windows changed colors,
I counted those.

The spider moved
back to my palm. I closed
my fingers softly, walked home.

There, my car was still running,
headlights still yellow
globes on my garage door,
dingy, flickering.

I lifted the spider to my porch light.
It caught the fixture
and found a hole to hide in.

Through the door, mail
I wouldn’t open. The television
gave news to an empty chair.

My shudders alone with the walls,
coping with the walls, simple things.
A shower. So much hot in all this
cold. So many faces mourning, me

without a face to come home to.
I cut a handful of hair
from my head, another, balled it up.

I dropped it all at my feet, left it
floating. I went back to find the spider,
but the spider had gone. One faint

strand of web hung from the porch light.
Simple things. There was rain,

but the sky couldn’t fall fast enough.
The world has never slowed down.
I never knew him. I never cared to try.

Brian D. Morrison completed his MFA at the University of Alabama, where he was an assistant editor at Black Warrior Review. His poetry has appeared at West Branch, Verse Daily, Copper Nickel, and other venues. Currently, he works as an Associate Teaching Professor of English at Ball State University.