for the sudden mid-life death of our son
some way to wipe the slate clean
let bygones be bygones.

But no one is liable
for an embolism, not the ski
patrol that swabbed the wound
after his accident, nor
the ER doc who stitched him up.
Not the orthopod who didn’t see him
because the image showed no harm to bone
nor the pandemic that made us all reluctant
to seek another view. Maybe a second doc
would have ordered Warfarin
but not until the slice was fully healed.
I can’t blame him for sleeping
and I know he did not want to die. Myself?
I told him to prop four pillows under his thigh.

No peace. No way to let go, no rest
in this quest where chance is the only culprit,
no reason, and there is no one to forgive.

—Estella Lauter

POET’S BIO:
After retiring from UW, Estella Lauter has reveled in Wisconsin’s writing community, publishing four chapbooks with Finishing Line Press. A member of three writing groups, she has received awards from WFOP, the WWA, Fox Cry and the Peninsula Pulse and been nominated for two Pushcart prizes. She won the 2009 Barbara Mandigo Kelly Peace Poetry contest, and her work has been published in literary journals such as Bramble and in several anthologies—most recently No More Can Fit into the Evening, Sheltering with Poems, Leaves of Peace and Hope Is the Thing. She served as Poet Laureate of Door County in 2013-2015, co- editing two anthologies of poems, Soundings: Door County in Poetry (2015) and Halfway to the North Pole (2020). She also co-edited the WFOP Poets Calendar (2017) with Francha Barnard on the theme of water. For the Door County Poets Collective, she and Nancy Rafal have submitted poems by a different Door County poet to the Peninsula Pulse each month since January 2020 for the column “Peninsula Poets.” She has offered Clearing classes on “Reading Contemporary Poetry” and would gladly do so again for any interested parties! Poetry may not be able to save the world, but it helps to identify what we love well enough to save.