implied death

poem, 19 lines

When he looks at you like
you're a ghost,
be a ghost.
  Skin like smoke and he'll smell
  you, even when you're gone.

And when he walks through
his forest,
be the spirits in the trees.
Hang like drying sheets, like
abandoned parachutes.
Watch him as he passes.

There's a fate
for you, there. Someday
he'll remember and you'll be
just another stone.
  He kicked rocks down the road
  in the town he grew up in.

You'll be a memory, small but
present, a gift, an unburied corpse.