It gathers and feeds at the table of our memory.
Stepping in cautiously among the thorns we grieve the loss of
the one we had, we grieve the loss of the one we didn't have.
The one who was and the one who might have been.
The one we may now rediscover the digging if the great root just
below the soft and hallowed surfaces of the child's forgotten earth.
I watched helpless as death came.
As it came to us all,
for it is truly those who remain that must
traffic deaths awkward and comfortless stumbling paths.
Not the one gone from us, perhaps they are the last to know.
And I struggled for something to
say, for the thing stuck in my throat.
There was just an odd and empty music that
filled the room that gave consent to our grief,
That whispered to us through the early watches of that night
promising and end to the weary and
lamentable sound of a body in combat.
And end to the dark spell that had been cast about us.
It was beautiful, it was ugly, it was holy, and it was unbearable,
it was sweet, and it was bitter,
and nakedness that needed not our shelters nor our explanations.
I became weary with watching listening.
I became weary with the racing of my own thoughts
I became weary of the unbelief the thing happening before me
I was unaware of the gathering weight
pressing upon my heart and I was helpless beneath it.
It was over in an unforeseen and yet
inevitable moment a life simply stopped.
And in the tranquil spaces of that motionless and fixed time and by
some instinct I placed my hand over my father's
heart that I might feel the last beating of it.
As though by some entitlement by some reward for the long nights
watch the dying pulses may have a continuance and that of my own.
Life unstoppable life unceasing life unrelenting life
tearing at it's borders life gnawing at the restraints.
Life being life, life giving itself over to life.
And I have wept I have torn at my heart I
have howled at the cold and speechless moon.
At the gray and unfeeling moon,
at comfortless moon, suspended and detached from us.
I weep with my mother's broken heart I have convulsed with memories
that came so swiftly so unmercifully that with unbearable
sweetness drinking me downward in their unquenching thirst.
I would ask this if my heart, that memory be faithful,
that I would not reinvent them in my flight from pain.
That I would not reduce to legend the one
taken from me as some creation of my grief.
Some imagined phantom of my need.
For I recalled things long forgotten, small things,
insignificant fragments,
shards of broken and discarded things that we may recount that we may
rediscover like treasure among the many living files and chronicles
the many awards and trophies of time,
things that once remembered sweep back upon us with a thorns sharp
sting the pain that sanctifies them and
makes them holy for grieving is loving.
A thing purchased over time.
It may take from us our words but returns to us the unrequested
poetry that thing that is one to the heart and sorrow
that feeds our hunger for speech for that which we cannot say.
At our tables there is now a conspicuous and living absence.
A prevailing silence where there had been quite conversation talk
of great things, of common things of dreams and of nothing at all.
If but to hear the voice again in the low and in the drowsy hung of
time spent together to see the face not easily
forgotten still to to me so alive so unhidden so present.
If I would have become a stranger to myself in your absence if I
come to know that closure is but a
myth that time alone heals no wound.
It wasn't time but love that purchased this grief.
That if I am now alone if am now orphaned widowed if I am childless
exiled from the life I have known when I am overcome when everything
me is racing but only to some undefined mark when I have no need of
words but would seek shelter,
when I am list in the great maze and the blindness of grief.
When I do not know which way I should take,
when choices themselves, even the simple seem impossible to make.
When the world I have known is suddenly changed forever
when all things seem unreasonable and I must rethink my life.
So come and sit with me,
but do not obligate me to words and do not fear my
silence, for I would ask but for the shelter of your company.

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