Letting go
Letting go
1.
a fragment of foreknowledge,
the grief before grief --
how it began,
on a night when a full moon
leaned into the car,
illuminated the familiar features
of your face,
your hands on the steering wheel,
and your foot slipping from the clutch
for the nth time,
and we refused to believe
it was anything but your shoe,
the carpet, or the wetness of the day
that precipitated the sudden
disappearance of feeling --
a vanishing.
Sclerosis:
"a morbid hardening of tissue
throughout the body"
We banished the word from speech,
excised it from page 1109 of the OED
along with scissors, scoff, scold, sconce.
On the reverse, we lost scoot, scope,
scorch and score,
the diminishing of our vocabulary
a necessary evil.
2
Describe pain --
on a scale of one to ten.
You conjured a slide rule;
the measurement required accuracy.
Pills tilted the room on its side,
windows disappeared into the earth.
You were falling into an abyss.
"Better the pain", you said.
Seasons slid past the tongue --
harvest moon, hunter's moon.
Wordless, we followed the phases
as they waned, waxed,
the eventual fullness a burst of promise,
ephemeral as forever.
At night the television remained on;
voices curled, like old friends,
inside your half-sleep,
substituted for remembered body warmth,
the casual weight of arm
across your thigh.
Inside your recurring dreams,
it was always summer,
and you were always running.
Outside, your legs were two white fish
beached on the shore.
We allowed denial to prop our days,
wrapped it round us like a blanket,
prayed for dreamless sleep.
3.
Each night your voice unstitched me,
your need so acute
I could feel it from the next room,
feel uninvited imaginings invade our nightscape,
flap like moths against a porch light --
diaphanous suicide bombers
longing for the revelation of light
in the split-second rush
towards death.
This was our lotus-land
of non-existence,
denial our chosen opioid.
We listened for each breath,
each shallow beat of heart.
Summer faded.
We skipped a season,
refused autumn's breath of decay,
the heavy scent of earth returning
to itself,
fell into winter's hibernation,
the creak of frozen twilight,
car headlamps bisecting the dark,
tires muted by snow,
their trajectory tracked by a waning moon.
Speechless,
we dreamed the cold alliteration
of snow and silence,
tried to sink into the feathered softness,
listen to the sizzle as cold tempered
despair's candent heat,
attempted an alchemy
which could convert pain
to understanding.
4.
Defeat came with sudden speed.
Denial crumbled.
I heard your absence,
your wingless flight
to where I could not follow.
You took language with you,
left me mute in now familiar silence.
Forever was the lie
that no longer sustained us,
the one learned in the safety net
of the womb,
the one inscribed on the bones
of the ribcage
in the sealed darkness
of life before life.
5.
They say black holds all the other colours
in its heart.
but I couldn't find them.
I became blind as well as mute,
fingers searching for a way out,
a way to forgive
the shattering of the promise of forever,
made before we grew into ourselves,
before we learned imagination
could not capture forever
any more than the mind could compass infinity,
the moon could stop waning after fullness
or our unspoken solitudes
could bridge the gaps between us.
Is it air that connects us when we cease to exist,
when words vanish into a forever vault?
A door shuts.
With words you wrote yourself into me.
I have found no words to write you back out.
