Joyce Reopel / "Medusa 111" / silverpoint, 1965

                  -a final accounting of a decades-long grievance-

Joyce Reopel,

silverpoint aficionado

is dead.

I came to know this when

an old art school friend sent the announcement

along with this notation: "William, for your archives"

via secret messenger because

he knew she'd held a shadowed place in my brain

as indelible as any act of rudeness.

the announcement included

photos of Joyce, and her husband, Mel,

non-aficionado of picture painting, also dead,

their deaths separated by a half-month passage of time.

some may see a measure of romance in that,

and that's ok, yet here is a side-by-side;

a pairing of sorts, like shoes or socks,

or an occupied two car garage, or two fewer

than the number of victims necessary to be classified

as a mass shooting event arbitrarily set at four

by the U.S. Department of Justice.

I hold no considerations of heaven or hell or the wacky

way-station known as purgatory,–– but certain moments remain

within the bowels of my continuing consciousness. 

death announces its resolution to cats, to dogs,

to priests counted among the sinners, to Joyce, to Mel,

to single cell organisms; to you and to me.