Poet Jane Mayhall died last Tuesday. Here is a piece from obitury in NYT (3/21/09):

“The Gilded Shadow"

The impact is simmering down, as into

a solvent liquid. That I’ll never hear your voice

again, but through a medium like

rain. Or will see you but in a lightning flash.

You are nature’s speech, the young girth

and deadly imprint.

I eagerly wait the date of your rebirth, in

the endless window-sky. Hovering cloud, really a

gilded shadow that lights your face outline. Waters

and land permit no elegy translated.

But a stark villanelle, facts rendered.

An indefinite, glorious seeding,

the element that draws us closest. Nucleus of

a meadow, the grass-tips’ ghost your

being. Bend me to earth, the only hereafter after death.

O shades beneath the sun. Or I don’t understand it —

like embracing a mystery hole in our minds,

this complex, heartbreak survival.