those poems and the lady who writes them
You are you and
I am me and
The house and
The kids and
The food and
The state of the car and
The laundry and
Only one whole universe.
I feel it, sometimes
Orbiting and pulsing near my
Ears,
Encircling my
Intestines,
Tickling my
Left pinky toe in that way that
Bites and burns inside my shoe.
I guess everything really is my fault
When I am a universe and
You are you.
I know I am a burden,
Life ever onward goes-
But absence is too easy,
Where grief’s pain only grows.
So please, my friend,
I beg you-
Please don’t leave me here alone.
I need to see and be seen,
To touch, to know, be known.
Presence cannot shatter
What already fell apart,
Be here, be still, and help me
Hold my fractured, weeping heart.
I know it’s hard to breathe sometimes,
I know it’s hard to pray,
I know the world stopped making sense
Because I couldn’t stay.
Your eyes are drained of tears to cry;
To wake and face each day
Demands the dregs of borrowed strength
Because I couldn’t stay.
In an unimaginable future,
There may be comfort I am free,
But here, in numb dark, only:
I couldn’t stay with thee.
Don’t let the darkness keep you,
Though stumble blind and crash you may:
Our hearts could never be unbound just
Because I couldn’t stay.
The Cyrene, pressed into service,
Or Veronica, rushing to aid;
The favor no one longs to render-
She is not born, but made.
I didn’t lose you,
Misplace you carelessly,
Like a set of keys or
An earring back.
I know where you are,
Where you lived and you died.
I have traced a thousand paths,
Believing in my pride
I could have kept you, if only for-
That.
I carry you still,
Biding your time until
We truly must part-
My grief is a throbbing
Emptiness,
Hammering in place of your heart.
I have had my fill of Grief,
O’er-sated with sorrows,
Yet still they swell;
Death, the Glutton,
Brooks no ransom:
Our taste, on Earth, of Hell.
My body is lovely as it
Holds the still full shape of you.
A last remembrance-
A promise of reunion.
He does not begin
What He does not complete.
The empty vase pleading to remember
There is a spring.
Dim dark doubtful days
That wake in weeping
And wracked, retire.
Myself a universe-
And a mournful one.
Devoid of desires save
Come, my Lord,
Oh quickly come!
Today He told me:
Meet me in the Middle Places.
In waiting, boredom, diaper changes,
In deserted wastes and wasted spaces
My dew storm softly rearranges.
Flammable and
Fragile-
fanned
and favored.
doused
drenched
dripping flame
So to dance-
The bush, the Ark, the stable-
the Great Romance.
