Just seconds after my grandma passed there,
a tension broke. When a spirit rises

from a body, it somehow grows
stronger, stiff, and then it splits in two.
In the same way our fingers still curl

when relaxed: what is it we’re poising for,
our whole lives? This is not a question
to ask right away. It comes much later on,

out of the hospital, in the aging summer
when you thought you moved past
those sorts of things. I tell myself the dead speak

in verse, if they do speak. If a body in the hospital,
just passed, has something to say, it would be
a closed fist: ready, ready, ready.

– Brendan Bense