It Is
She said All you have to do is tell it like it is.
I knew this was much easier said than done because
how can you be sure you’re seeing it like it is,
the seeing the obvious prerequisite to the telling?
But she had smooth skin with a wasp-waist and
devourable shoulders and loved me simply for who I was,
at least that’s what she kept telling me. So I believed her.
I took her hand and followed her through the
eye of the needle, somewhere along the way dropping
my scales and began to see as she saw. I emerged from that
night spent, blind as a prophet, finally pledging my love to her.
In that declaration, like some drugstore fiction, the river
whispered her name. She died that fall as early snow fell
with a metronomic steadiness, her spirit rising to
become a piece of the sun in God’s sky.
Her parting words to me were Do not grieve for me.
But this I could not do, and still cannot. I daily shake
my fist at the sun, the impotent act of a remainder.
I live on like this, like it is, bruised by her luminance,
cursed by her vision. Triste.
stunningly beautiful…
Sad, yes. I’m glad you went where you thought you could not. I’m glad you allowed her to change you. I’m glad you wrote out your loss on the page; I did the same, today, and I think there is no better company than yours.
*swift intake of breath*
wow.
B
eautiful, I’m speechless!
Can’t say a lot except I was here and thought you should know.
This takes my breath away. Oh, the exquisite and ever deepening river of lament …
How painfully beautiful x
Somehow I am reminded of Dante’s Beatrice in this.
Thank you.