I do not lie, Ima. I go into the garden, conscious

               of Ottawan winter and spring’s thickening specter.  
The moment snow clutches at my arms, I gather

               in my bare hand a clump, fingers stinging. 
A suffocation heavy with the expectation

               that I may throw what troubles me
into her laughing face, nose pink.

               Swiftly, like you taught me, I turn it pinker.
I turn every color more than what it is.

               I am not supposed to turn away.
And though we never spoke of it,

               you once said that leaving was contagious
and without antecedent, sometimes,

               like love and all its blossoming
hyperboles. When the sleeping beast

               from our backyard woke,
smoke foaming from its mouth the whitest

               white no one had ever seen,
you next to me spouting, If paradise is to be here,

               like a prayer, an omen, a threat,
I chose to move, be moved,

               because I couldn’t bear to be buried
by something beautiful that I did not know

               the name of. My daughter breaks open
onto this same curiosity. In the room where we lie,

               moonlight from the window
not the monsoon that had blown out

               all the town’s streetlamps simultaneously, 
I say often how white is agony but also two glorious eyes—

               yours—when they remained open that epochal evening.
Year after year, it’s the still-thriving flowers

               of our old home’s Mabolo tree, 
the one I thought danced quietly

               in death, weighed by plush ash. And God,
can death stretch a thousand miles.

               Certain it’s a skipped stone cutting the waves 
between us clean. How it pursues,

               like memory, years full of absence.
And then, a conjuring. I’ve yet to learn

               the difference between life and a lie.
But there seems always, unremarkably, to be more of it.

               Like the apparition of petals you pointed out,

                              to me, that next morning—