Death. how does it conform to life?
do we take a path not taken, obscuring the journey we had made? or do we make it
easy for our loved ones to be able to find us
and ascribe memory to the loss?
myself, I am lucky. I think:
words, books, volumes—posterity is easy, perhaps to a damning fault.
could it be that one hundred and fifty years from now, my great-great-
granddaughter will try to find me and miss
all the signs and clues that are too obvious to me now in this life?
there will come a time when the battery will run low, and
there will be no way to charge or back-up, and she
will have to draw pictures in the dust that settled, and my memory
will be at her mercy, her will,
her whim, her beck-and-call.
blue plastic bowl, ashen earth blue,
like a gray blanket thrown over a new day,
holds three smooth stones destined
for decoration in water lapped up by cat tongue
beyond cat lips. I watch her drink,
and I wonder about my next reincarnation
that my mother constantly warned me about
as I grew up and perceiving myself to be so alone.
“What you do not finish eating will be waiting
for you when you die—rotting and full of maggots.
You will eat what maggots eat, and you will eat the maggots too.”
every day, three times a day, these words were said to me,
ending each meal just as ritualistically as the blessing I whispered
right before my first bite.
I never saw maggots in the flesh, however, until I was 14 years old,
and I’d seen and heard too much by then
to care about religion and afterlife anymore.
until today, this moment, when I wonder about such things
as I sit and sip my cold coffee,
wondering how and if I could someday, maybe,
come back to life as a cat, to be cared for
by someone like me.
Her favorite color, if she were forced to name one, was brown. Plain brown.
Or maybe, on the third Friday of every month, gray—gray with an A,
Not grey with the exotically European E.
Breakfast: dry toast with a glass of water, room temperature.
Her kind was never meant to reproduce,
Except through poetry
of perhaps the existential variety.
Woman whose name begins with
M or J or both,
writes a letter to no one,
meaning, she's writing a letter to herself,
something she may or may not keep but will eventually be discarded of anyway because it's too quiet to be made curious.
It is an imaginary letter to an imaginary person she would like to be her friend.
Dear ----,
I changed the cat's food from dry chicken to wet tuna, and she liked it at first. But it didn't agree with her. I should have known better than to change it.
If you think of it some time, please visit. I'd love to show you my marble collection.
Yours,
MJ
--composition in progress--
...
The End
replaced by memories banked for triumphant times like
births and exotic vacation resorts. Before that, though,
we had to navigate smoky carpets and dirty dishes
catching downward messages of how we
recovered each other from our old lives
gone black.
Investments, now, will save us
from not having that RV life we dream of,
where we will drive across statelines to our
next destination of together forever, beyond.
I seemed to disappear into barely audible whispers of caution and resistance.
Then reemergence. Then relief.
(Peek-a-boo is more than a sexy grown-up game of lingerie beyond innuendo.)
The sudden tragedy of newness is the realization that it's no longer new, but now,
something else must be kept and held close.
To disappear hesitation,
to reappear a smile of certainty.
the story of how we folded into each other during a time
when love was all that was around
to be given. Honestly, neither of us
was smooth, stuttering
to ourselves under our breath, trying to
stand casual. I tried to wipe away tears,
you tried to stay away. Typical.
Now, not so.
Every morning, an I-love-you.
Every sneeze, an I-love-you.
Every night, an I-love-you, seeyouinthemorning.
We've dropped these pins of ourselves from California to Canada,
with this vow: We shan't live alone again. Til death,
even that will never us part. Together,
our light will rise softly,
filter through the blind,
young new lovers folding into each other will linger
on our soul's embrace.
Start with one foot underneath you after you've fallen, hard. And take a while to think about how much that hurt, and why.
Then notice
the green of the leaves above, the grey of the sidewalk beneath. The hardness, the cool.
You sit a while, you forget to breathe.
You stand up, slowly, and suddenly you might dance. Your back is not wracked with the aches that became your friends when you had no one else to talk with.
Next time you stumble, you will have a hand to grab onto, to steady
yourself.
And you'll find yourself
there.
Posted via LiveJournal.app.
- Current Location:Canada, British Columbia
is the Universe evolving us into fluidity. We’ve been made
to melt.
I catch the tear before it slips from the corner of your eye.
My salt on yours.
anxious
calm
breathless
We’ve recollected all our clichés and built a solid foundation with them.
I found a stray one in the corner,
under dust and hair, something my sister taught me
on her wedding day. I was her flower girl, and I carried a plastic bouquet.
I kept it on my dresser in a white vase,
until the day she found out
and hid in a basement full of rats so she could find out more.
That day, I became older, and I put the bouquet in my mother’s closet
in a box of Christmas decorations.
There’s my cliché.
We can beat the odds.
My salt on yours.
- Current Mood:
accomplished
Control formations in the sand. Dunes and dips meeting on an uneven line, drawn by a breath, a breeze. Sound at a distance carried by the crest, a flare for that second, a memory in the next. Nothing else but wonder.
Posted via LiveJournal.app.
- Current Location:Canada, British Columbia
the wave of needing release,
a swell, being full.
- Current Mood:
nauseated
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