For our son, a teacher of German, among the slain at Virginia Tech, April 16, 2007

• He scooped it with deft, long-fingered hands and tamed it
  with an elastic band, or let it hang loose on the flat bony cliff of his back.
  His hair declared him his own bohemian, a middle-class free spirit
  with a mortgage to pay down, a racing bike, a subscription to Netflix,
  and a frau as deceptively frail as Hans Memling’s palest Madonna.
   
• Married, he cut it but twice and only to give away.
  He then looked like a soldier or a monk—though neither calling
  set his mind afire as did the table saw or the digital collage.
  Long again, his hair gave him a faint resemblance to the rock star
  he aped at a party—“Famous Dead People”—two months before
  falling into his own celebrity, if only for fourteen minutes.
   
• Riding shotgun in a dry-ice mental fog, I carried his hair
  back from the mortuary in a Ziploc freezer bag.
  Later, we Googled the guidelines of the organization
  to which we sent this salvaged relic of his immolated body.
   
• Sometimes I try to picture its recipient, thinking on her world—
  a purple zinnia, a swim in the bell-shaped pool, a milkshake
  after chemo—but I see only his shorn head at the crematory door,
  serene as a bodhisattva, soon to kindle in a fire that will never consume
  our love, a fire his hair escaped to adorn the skull of someone younger—
  dying, but not yet dead.