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bereft, mourning 19 Paradise Tess Gallagher Morning and the night uncoupled. My childhood friend who had been staying awake for me, left the house so I could be alone with the powerful raft of his body. He seemed to be there only for listening, an afterlife I hadn’t expected. So I talked to him, told him things I needed to hear myself tell him, and he listened, I can say “peacefully,” though maybe it was only an effect he had, the body’s surety when it becomes one muscle. Still, I believe I heard my own voice then, as he might have heard it, eagerly like the nostrils of any mare blowing softly over the damp presence he was, telling it all is safe here, all is calm and yet to be endured where you are gone from. I spoke until there was nothing unfinished between us. Since his feet were still there and my hands I rubbed them with oil because it is hard to imagine at first that the dead don’t enjoy those same things they did when alive. And even if it happened only as a last thing, it was the right last thing. For to confirm what is forever beyond speech pulls action out of us. And if it is only childlike and unreceived, the way a child hums to the stick it is using to scratch houses into the dirt, still it is a silky membrane and shining even to the closed eye. ...

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