With your tousled hair and eyes made of fallen bits of the sky,
the clouds knew you and wept for you when you left us.
The mountain summits knew you, and wept for you.
The desert remembered you and mourned for you.
Memory circles the rug by the fire like a cat or a dog
settling in for a long winter nap, but finds little comfort there.
The fire snarls, the logs pop like a gun, or the cracking of a whip,
and smoke curls around my hair like a snake.
It is late, and last night the tomcat was speaking of you
as he patrolled the edges of the garden.
He looked for you among the squashes and the rhubarb.
He spoke of lost tuna dinners and wondered why
you did not pull up the weeds, why you did not rise
and go to your notebook with pen in hand.
Rendering the next sonnet in your mind.
Once you promised me the moon, and the sun rose
in my belly, with that broken promise, we came undone.
You promised me what was not possible
and we spent our lives running from the truth.
We ran to the opposite corners of the earth
in search of something holy and profound
to nourish that rage and hunger of art, each in our own way,
the baggage of the past burdening us down.
We didn’t see the swift current, and its bright undertow
bending the night to its will, where the water-ouzel
hunted among the rocks for the coinage
of small silvered fish glinting in the morning light.
My grandmother said, to let a bird in,
was to let death come into the house.
When I go down to to the well of sorrow,
I find you among the cresses and the mosses.
Sometimes I perch on the low stone wall
to watch the first stars appear in the eye of the well.
What is still alive between us, is memory,
perhaps more mine, than yours,
as we each hold different bags of grief
made from the same skin of the heron.
And so I mourn for you, and the flight of birds
stitches the sky into a mosaic of loss.
The birds gather strands of my hair,
weaving time and sorrow into a web,
a nest where the small speckled eggs of memory
incubate into truth, and we remember what was good,
all the betrayals of dailyness fell into dust
until all that remains are the remnants—
those small scraps of love we once held so dear.
Shards of grief and loss litter the landscape of memory,
piercing us to the core. But they have have moved the walls.
And we hung onto the next best thing,
never allowing grief gather in its wings and to settle in,
or to take root and to go to seed, we abbreviated
the process into meaningless soundbytes,
ready to move onto the next best thing.
You left before the pandemic, good move.
Because if the cancer didn’t get you then covid would have.
It felled us like flies after the first frost,
five million dead, and still counting. Will it ever end?
It’s as if the black death came to pay a visit
and the world came undone.
The psyche that scarred us for centuries, continues on.
Everyone is looking for explanations, reasons why,
challenging the concept of Godhead.
Who would do such a thing to us, and why?
And yet you still come to me in dreams.
You were my guiding star, my shining light,
and what I learned, for you were also my teacher.
And for that I am grateful.
8/27 Writing through grief workshop with Eileen Elizabeth Espinoza, Soul Bone Literary Festival, MIU, Zoom event
1 comment:
💙
Post a Comment