Dried

When you were born, I held you in my hands.

When you died, my hands brushed you face and raised the sheet that served as your shroud in that oddly quiet and sterile room.

I always had such a way with living things: people, pets, plants, words.

Everything I touch now seems to dry up and wither away, since you have gone.

Yet somehow, I have not succumbed to failure to thrive.

Why?

Four-fold

The Teacher spoke and you appeared. For me.

Like skin attached to muscles, connected by sinew and enlivened by nerves, you were to me. And I to you.

For it is so plain.

Let the wise among us hear.  See these truths.

*

Feed me. I hungered and you gave me food for my body and fed my heart.

Without you I am wasting away, one molecule at a time.

Slipping back to the Great Darkness where I slumbered before I was sang into the Light.

You were in the Darkness, so I was not in fear. Only unaware yet always safe.

*

Quench my thirst. I was parched, fevered and you gave me water. Your tears of concern refreshed my soul, for I knew you would split your last drop of water in half so that neither of us would have to suffer discomfort.

Yet there is no one like you, no one to hear my cries in the night and rush to me. No one to put the cool rim of the glass to my lips.

A cool loving hand to my burning brow.

*

Shelter me. I was wandering and weary, and you opened the door, lit the room. Wrapped a warm blanket around me, showered me with words and knocked the ice of fear off my mind.

Who will make sure I have a warm place to sleep? Only you would give up your bed, allowing me to take the place where your body heated the sheets.

You would watch over me until I was firmly encased in a restful, quiet sleep.

*

Visit me. When I was in a prison of confusion, you faithfully visited me. Day after day until the bars bent and the door swung open.

I have no visitors now. Chained in a dank corner, watching listlessly as the light throws the pattern of day, noon, night on the cold floor.

I wait for your footfalls but I know that I will not hear yours or any other.

No matter, for only you held the key to the doors of this cell.

*

Reach

Days turn into nights. Time is like oil on the floor, I slip across it, blind.

You were my eyes, my ears. My loving smiling metronome.

What is time, if it exists with you?

He told me that it would break your heart if I came to you, prematurely, ahead of schedule.

He is right; if you were there. But you are not.

The sweet soft eternal darkness. Not filled with honey-coated dreams nor terror, sight and sound.

If there was more, you would have come and told me.

You loved me–you would have come for me, if you were neither destroyed or transmuted.  You would have saw me crying and told me not to weep, for we were leaving together. I would not need anything, for your heart held everything for the journey.

You would not have left me cold on the floor, barely able to stand or speak  because my grief turned into physical knives and nearly broke my mind.

You would not stay away. You would not leave a sign. You would not hold back on giving me the date when I am to join you and the great mass of the departed.

You are gone. How terrifying is the thought of the last time I saw you-cold, silent-is the last time I will truly see you.

For when I close my eyes for the last time, I will not see or be seen, either.

I had you.

But I do not anymore.

Either I live with it. Or die from it.

Quotes 2

‘Nobody should,’  said Joel. “That’s why in the Bible the priests drew lots to determine who would conduct the ritual slaughter, and they rotated the job every month. Slaughter is dehumanizing work if you have to do it every day.”

Temple Grandin, the animal-handling expert who’s helped design many slaughterhouses, has written that it is not uncommon for full-time slaughterhouse workers to become sadistic. “Processing but a few days a month means we can actually think about what we are doing”, Joel said, “and be as careful and humane as possible.”

-The Omnivore’s Dilemma, from Chapter 12, Slaughter In a Glass Abattoir, p. 235

Here

“Let’s go for a ride,’ he said softly, as he pulled me out the door.

It was cold; big fluffy flakes like dreams falling thickly.

Driving, he barely spoke, did not even turn the radio on. I reached for it but he pushed my hand away.

We stopped at the side entrance of the oldest graveyard in town. I thought we were going somewhere. I had strolled around that place for years.

Arm in arm, we walked down the freshly shoveled paths. I heard the soft muffle of our footsteps. Not a bird was chirping, no movement but the dancing snow.

Veering left, he led me across the frozen grass to the old Knopf family crypt. It was still in good shape, unlike the Phillips across from it and the other crumbling angels monuments of years gone by. Not anyone left on those ancient trees to tend to the upkeep.

Suddenly, he turned, grabbed me, kissed me. His lips were chilled and his breath was hard. Not soft, as he normally was when he opened his mouth to me.

Placing his right hand on top of my head, he pushed, and began to sink, so I followed him. To my knees, then onto my back.

He did not speak, he just stared. Long moments without a blink. Only partially supported on his elbows, his weight pressing me down.

The cold seeped into my coat, my skin. I felt it easing into my muscles, wrapping lovingly around my joints.
I began to shiver.

His lifted his hips, making room for his hands, that slid up my skirt. A fresh blast of wind hit my always cold thighs.

Teeth chattering a tear seeping form the corner of my eye, I stared back, confused. Then defiant.

Then, a warm coal. Heat, pushing into me.

Dazed from the snow falling onto me, I hung onto it, welcomed it.

I turned my head and took at the ruined, worn tombstone to the right of me. And felt that I was next.

“Where are you? “he asked.

“Home,” I replied.

“Are you afraid? When you are in the ground, I cannot warm you this way.”

I paused.

And truthfully told hm ‘no.’

There he took me. His eyes radiating an acceptance of death, his body cushioned from the hard cold  ground by my softness.

Offering me his tongue, I tasted ice.

Looking up at the sky, blinded by the snow, I felt the stone angels, blinded by time, sigh softly, gently  for me.