Things to cry about...
Golden Us
Originally uploaded by Vettha. While I'm on a roll...
So, I've been trying to memorize this poem... because it reminds me of Karen, and our divorce.
Losing Scout seems to be bringing all this back up for me... Grief is a spiral, right?
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Sharks
By Tara Hardy
I love you more than all of the oceans, but I wouldn’t give them up to keep you. I love you more than all the wind that has ever reached me. But without it, there’d be no weather, just constant, static, pollution - the ozone stretched past elastic capacity towards collapse on this fading green city. For without the wind, there’d be no flora, just pollen gone impotent on vine.
I love you more than all of my work, but I can’t get myself to leave it. Or you. Leave it. Or you. Are you leaving me? Either one of us has woken up sweaty to beckon the other on the hundred or so nights since summer. Apparently, when wolves grieve, they hibernate, tuck away in the dark, to howl silently, whisper screams into their fur. This month, the sun is intruder, the leaves look funny, and our dog has been under the couch for days.
Today, the clock ticks, behind me, the one that hung above us for the windfall of our wedded years. I wonder how many seconds you lay sleeping next to me, and wish I’d kept my eyes open to memorize the rise and fall of your back, the way your eyes fluttered. You are beautiful in the morning. I wish I’d kept my mother’s tongue to myself, my father’s silence under the bed, where I still keep the jar in which I collected the lint from your belly button. It’s not even half-full. You’d say not half empty.
We can’t even agree on that, let alone - who left who? You to your life, or me to me? You concede that for too many months in 2003 you may have led me to believe you’d be home for dinner. But didn’t I have my art? There’s a shark on your back, it took 10 hours to tattoo. When I stopped waiting, it was his shadow you turned on me. His enemy any wall built by anyone but you, your blame, indictment, fear, logic, bones through them.
I came from a long line of enduring women. I know how to feed a family on a carcass for a week, to leave the oven open when there’s no heat. I know how to sit in chrysalis for years until the future blurs into one long rocking chair night, where virtue equals sacrifice. So, looking back at you from the door, I have two equal instincts. The first, to rush towards you, dim, pledge my light. Because no one I could hope to love will ever be as worthy. The second, to jump the track of my ancestral line. If the opposite of death is desire, then let me invite this slice as the original welcome to hunger.
I love you more than all of our futures, but I’m giving them up for daylight. For my pen in the morning seducing paper to noon, until I meet myself under the streetlamp. If moths can mistake them for sun, I think wolves might howl these streets half empty, or full, depending on how you look at it, of girls half drunk on grief. Nothing but the down of our arms to keep the wind out, to keep the screams silent of how we’ve had to leave again, or been left again - depending on from what angle you howl at it.
I know you think I left you for another shark; there were a fair number circling - clocks in their mouths, timeshares of attention, affection. But I never left you for a shark. I left you for something far greater. The sea. I’ll write you sometimes. From beside her. Still loving you more than all of her salty kisses. But sailing on full gusts because I love one thing more than you. Me.