dulcet lullaby

After all:  Forsythia is flowering, and the assurance of absolution blossoms also, now feverishly, just as the landscape flashes after long coldness into a blaze of yellow.  This is grace.  This is:  renewal, lightness, and hope.  This is remembrance of sacrifice for the forgiveness of our sins.   This soothing, this sting. 

After all.  Divinity is not something we can ever achieve, though we may strive. 

After all: though we’d had our era of ice, your eyes shone in their triangular blue fashion when we came together again.  And we were lovely.  Soon then it was the end and you died valiantly, denying mortality and working until you coiled up one morning in bed and surprising: took a last gasp.  The architecture of you emptied:  I entered the swirl for the first time, dipping slowly to assemble our us.   And then I left, to gather the disbanded.

After all: I treasure the broken prop from your boat motor; the rusty oyster knife you gave me and never accused me of stealing; the Styrofoam cooler with a “FISH ON” bumper sticker slathered across the front, once full with ice and Hama Hama oysters; and memories I swear are real.  In time, cleansed, peace came here to bloom.

After all: exoneration, merciful love, these are of grave import.  Watery recollections of winks, warm square hands on my wedding day, and our talk of the weather were consequential.  And then: a familiar signature pressed onto paper well after our détente, which demonstrates a lack of faith. In me.  How weak is my twisted conviction.

After all:  you died skinny and bismuth yellow and without parting assurances.  Humble:  it caught you.  Ugliness and earthliness and, even as it ripped rage to the surface, its violence too reminds.   We are minor.  We are the unsplendid.

After all.  After all:  bathing in the memory-clotted gel of time, back and forth and back, years of circling through the wet, immersed in the teary sea that swelled after your death, I realize finally that what I was kissing was your yawn.

And how can this happen now, with the forsythia blooming around me, when we cannot kneel toward each other and hope?  


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previously published at nancy kiefer art/diva creativa   http://www.nancykiefer.com    april 2010