for Phoebe Johnson
the week before you should have returned it
you died without warning, the last pages
not turned to, causing the worlds it contains
to continue unleafed through, a trunk lid
padlocking them in, your life in truth close
to its end, still in play when, mid-sentence
a period rolled backwards and silence
wobbling uselessly to rest after “so”
or “could well have been,” your appetite for
wanting to cap off a long life not to
be described, but left rough, not set apart
as done, the book found in your lap bearing
you forward, its first words: “it began to
snow half an hour after the train started”
John Barton’s twelfth book of poems, Lost Family: A Memoir, was nominated for the 2021 Derek Walcott Prize. His thirteenth, Compulsory Figures, is forthcoming in 2025. Born in Edmonton, Alberta, and raised in Calgary, he lives in Victoria, BC, where he was the city’s poet laureate from 2019 to 2022.
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