I once wrote a poem which appeared to mourn the death of a pet.

After reading it, a friend asked about the pet, which he presumed to be a dog.

I told him that the dog was a figment of my imagination, as was its death and the scenario in which
  I imagined its memorial:

the person I was with in the poem, the cold evening and the frost that formed on the grass.

The friend, a poet, seemed annoyed and disappointed.

He had wanted to be in on the trick

even if he couldn’t be sure what would be pulled from the hat.

Lying comes with many responsibilities, or as many as we choose to acknowledge, or none.

Or it needn’t be called lying at all.

The two scenes I described in the poem were not retellings but I have,
in other streams of time, known the deaths of animals and humans,

and dark nights and frost on the grass,

and being in the quiet company of another person in the aftermath of grief, as has practically everyone else.

The poem, in part, had been about how we manage death in ritual or through contact with the living, or how
  we fail to manage it at all.
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