Claire

In the new novel I am writing, much depends on a poet, Karen Chamisso,  I figure my last novel, which I still haven't placed with an agent, was all about the Bush era, and for that I needed a political murder. For the Obama era, I have decided my guttering candle that will light my way through the murk will be a poet who is also the heiress of a fortune made by her father in the bug extermination trade. You'd be surprised. So I've been writing Chamisso poems. This is one.

Claire

Claire taught me the larger gestures

The kabuki theater of entrances and exits

In sky high boots at the Killer club

Sweeping into the backseat of the taxi at 2 a.m.

The seriousness at the center of silliness

A moral position, stoic,

Enduring the battering of ten thousand bragging boys.

Claire taught me the larger gestures but

Claire died. They dragged her body from the river.

She chose the largest exit. And though I see and feel

The moral position, I can only visit, stricken.

They buried her in Alpharetta.

Oh Claire. Honeychild.