1725: the fidelity of epitaphs (20 days later) | Marty McConnell
"the fidelity of epitaphs (20 days later)"
Marty McConnell
you want to change something about your life
but your lover took both pairs of tweezers.
so you settle for shaving your legs again
and writing around one calf
in drunken pen the lines you keep
reciting to yourself from Marie’s poem
and which you will get
tattooed on that spot as soon
as the credit card company agrees
to pay for it: I am living.
I remember you. yesterday
you wrote a poem that began,
I go to work under a heavy
turban of grief and last week,
Gabi, I’ve been drafting epitaphs
all day - you find an old
pair of tweezers in the back
of the medicine cabinet
and get pulling. each sweet yank
a morsel of pain so good you begin
to understand those teenagers
who carve themselves into scarecrow
figurines. this small pain has
a location. a yes
and an end. what no one tells you
about grief is that it has no edges.
that no matter how much
you love the world, how grateful you are
for sunflowers and trashcans
and your unglamorously aging bones,
you’ll still have dreams
where you’re screaming across a table
at each other about something, you can’t
figure out why until you realize
she died. and here you are. a dull
pair of tweezers in a cluttered apartment,
crying on the floor. you want to make
something beautiful out of your life
but you never learned to paint
and you’re nearly 37. you have
no children and you burn dinner
more often than you dance. you feel
like a cloth set down on something spilled.
useful but soiled. handy, but not essential.
maybe you’ll evaporate, or come apart
in the wash. maybe you’ll figure out
what binds you to this planet
is not a magnet, but a cord so fine
you can slide it across one hand, fold
your fingers around the slippery
umbilical. pull. here is sorrow.
pull. and here is bread. pull. some light
breaks across the linoleum. pull.
where do we go from here.
You learn to ask almost anything/is to ask it to be over
Marty McConnell
you want to change something about your life
but your lover took both pairs of tweezers.
so you settle for shaving your legs again
and writing around one calf
in drunken pen the lines you keep
reciting to yourself from Marie’s poem
and which you will get
tattooed on that spot as soon
as the credit card company agrees
to pay for it: I am living.
I remember you. yesterday
you wrote a poem that began,
I go to work under a heavy
turban of grief and last week,
Gabi, I’ve been drafting epitaphs
all day - you find an old
pair of tweezers in the back
of the medicine cabinet
and get pulling. each sweet yank
a morsel of pain so good you begin
to understand those teenagers
who carve themselves into scarecrow
figurines. this small pain has
a location. a yes
and an end. what no one tells you
about grief is that it has no edges.
that no matter how much
you love the world, how grateful you are
for sunflowers and trashcans
and your unglamorously aging bones,
you’ll still have dreams
where you’re screaming across a table
at each other about something, you can’t
figure out why until you realize
she died. and here you are. a dull
pair of tweezers in a cluttered apartment,
crying on the floor. you want to make
something beautiful out of your life
but you never learned to paint
and you’re nearly 37. you have
no children and you burn dinner
more often than you dance. you feel
like a cloth set down on something spilled.
useful but soiled. handy, but not essential.
maybe you’ll evaporate, or come apart
in the wash. maybe you’ll figure out
what binds you to this planet
is not a magnet, but a cord so fine
you can slide it across one hand, fold
your fingers around the slippery
umbilical. pull. here is sorrow.
pull. and here is bread. pull. some light
breaks across the linoleum. pull.
where do we go from here.
You learn to ask almost anything/is to ask it to be over