Poetry By Susan Musgrave

Daniel Tuttle CC




SOCIAL DISTANCING AT THE CREMATORIUM 

This is where I last see you, in a cardboard casket
“friendly to the environment,” which would have 
made you laugh, filled with Stargazer lilies, the kind
your father brought to my hospital bed the day
you came flailing into this world, the kind you carried 
in your wedding bouquet less than a decade ago. 
We lined the path to the beach with the lilies 
you couldn’t hold, and the whole forest smelled fecund,
like earth after rain. Nearly everyone in the wedding party 
was high on cocaine. Your divorce became final the day 
you overdosed on Fentanyl in Vernon. 

It took me weeks to alter your wedding gown — each time
you came to try it on you had grown thinner, more far away.
I took in the seams and said nothing, for fear of losing you
for good, the way words can so easily become wounds. 

You were the only patient in the Intensive Care Unit
who didn’t have Covid, and you hadn’t been vaccinated. 
A bed was made for you in the hospital’s recovery room
where you wouldn’t risk infection, The doctor, who guided 
me into a darker room to discuss what you would like done
with your organs, left the door ajar. The door had a dint
near the handle, as if someone had tried to kick it in. 
(If God is in the details, where was God that day?)

A sign at the crematorium in Armstrong says Practise 
Social Distancing. You have gone beyond distance; death 
has made a permanent stranger of your face. There is no time
this time, to alter the clothes I’ve dressed you in. Love
comes and goes the way the wind blows, the world cuts you
open, and you don’t close. You don’t close. You don’t close.

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Susan Musgrave lives on Haida Gwaii, islands in the North Pacific that lie equidistant from Luxor, Machu Picchu, Ninevah and Timbuktu. The high point of her literary career was finding her name in the index of Montreal‘s Irish Mafia. She has published more than 35 books in six categories — poetry, novels, non-fiction, food writing, editing and books for children. Her recent collection, Exculpatory Lilies, was a finalist for the Griffin Poetry Prize and the Governor General’s Award for Poetry, 2023. Hunger: the Poetry of Susan Musgrave, edited by Micheline Maylor, was published in 2025 by Wilfrid Laurier University Press.