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?

Cards

Piling up. Time.

Hours, minutes, seconds split into fifths.

The days folding neatly into each other.

The ragged edges only appear at night, when I go to bed and your voice does not track softly behind me to say goodnight.

The leaves are turning, like the world. Without you. Me with you.

Standing at the top of hills, at top of stairs, on balconies, I wonder.

Wonder if you will catch me if I willingly fall.

Will you ghostly arms cradle my soul, as I my body loses the fight against the hard surface?

Or will I wake, even more broken, dragging my ruined body like a dog left to side by the side of an abandoned road?

Bits and pieces of the flotsam of the universe after all; walking, talking, living, dying.

How does the my world function without you?

But then again, why would it not?

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.

Emit

Your shirt still hangs in the bathroom. I cannot remove it, only brush my fingers over the smooth woven cotton as I enter and leave the tub. Look at it, as I brush my teeth. Turn the light out and walk away.

Paused, hand on the frame. Watching it sway very gently in the breeze.

I want to leave it there. I want you to open the door and change into it, before you ask me for dinner.

You are gone.  Leaving on reflections hanging on the wall, flowers cut and arranged in your stead.

Colors. Sights.

No sound, no you.

After I left the cemetery, I took off my blouse. Pressing my nose into it, to smother my tears. I caught magnolia, tea, incense, my  sweetish natural scent.

So different from your salted territorial musk.

Stumbling and half-blind, I slid one of your freshly-laundered shirts over my head, and used it as my anchor. Lying on your bed, I felt my soul dripping onto the duvet.

You are gone.You were the love who loved me. The one who cared, who would go insane without me.

Who will bury their face in my blouse, before it is packed away for charity, upon my timely demise?

Smoke

I am crying over you. You are leaving.

I will not tell you about how I have soaked my pillow or of how I feel my heart is deflating with every hour closer to that day. For it would make you sad.

Every drop of moisture coming from me-sweat, spit, tears, in my exhaled breath-is in honor of you.

~~~

I

THOU hast made me known to friends whom I knew not. Thou hast given me seats in homes not my own. Thou hast brought the distant near and made a brother of the stranger. I am uneasy at heart when I have to leave my accustomed shelter; I forgot that there abides the old in the new, and that there also thou abidest. Through birth and death, in this world or in others, wherever thou leadest me it is thou, the same, the one companion of my endless life who ever linkest my heart with bonds of joy to the unfamiliar. When one knows thee, then alien there is none, then no door is shut. Oh, grant me my prayer that I may never lose the bliss of the touch of the One in the play of the many.

IV

By all means they try to hold me secure who love me in this world. But it is otherwise with thy love, which is greater than theirs, and thou keepest me free. Lest I forget them they never venture to leave me alone. But day passes by after day and thou art not seen. If I call not thee in my prayers, if I keep not thee in my heart-thy love for me still waits for my love.

V

I was not aware of the moment when I first crossed the threshold of this life. What was the power that made me open out into this vast mystery like a bud in the forest at midnight? When in the morning I looked upon the light I felt in a moment that I was no stranger in this world, that the inscrutable without name and form had taken me in its arms in the form of my own mother. Even so, in death the same unknown will appear as ever known to me. And because I love this life, I know I shall love death as well. The child cries out when from the right breast the mother takes it away to find in the very next moment its consolation in the left one.

-Rabindranath Tagore {Gitanjali, 357}