There is no doubt that the undersoftness of the skin is a shudder, the jaunt shoulderblades of something more. Molded to the drought of our time, the set-sailing fall beneath what waves we have know most intimately, ridden high in the sky with a might impervious to the love we should have swallowed whole.
No sorrow stands in the way today, or clouds the fiery pink of dawn's skies: rather we are marked by a racket unreachable by roar or rain, a calling back to a wish we cast upon a stone, serenaded amongst pyramids boxed inside our singing city; histories we have stolen and made ours.
Who will joust with our minarets of youth? How to recall what we have lost not with countless steps, but with countering that which is left to memory, slippery if miniature in mourning, too sweet to swallow whole. As love.
As life, as the ridiculed Moby Dick with filthy, fiery eyes, arched in the earth's bowels, fraught with too much to feed upon and far too much suffering to tuck away inside.
If this is loss, we suppose, there is no room to lose more; our apartment is full of recollection, dreary, rage-inducing rubble. Grief here gapes open-mouthed and, as toddlers, everything we touch is new. This newness is itself different; it knows no novelty, but rather the proof of dirtied hands and dirtier hearts. A desperation for re-entertaining the pristine, still being rigorous with so much gone. With the wind, the fire, with the water that always washes back; either sparks or soothes our wounds.
It is an ebb and flow, this and us and our broken hearts. It is no softening, no escaping, but rather reveling in the rare moments too full with life to ignore or kick back with long legs or fall asleep to in the jumbled exhaustion that embraces and releases, patternless and not one bit paternal in its warmth.
Sometimes, these days, we even throw back our heads and belly laugh; or kiss fiercely the young child that raises his eyebrows in reference to you. Sometimes, all is burnt with breath, inside, in starts, in the same wild wind that could not bring you back.
Perhaps it is because I was not there beside you that my mind is full with only fishes and frantic hideaways. Perhaps I am happier to know you now--or it is somehow right to remember you--curled to the side of a broken rowboat, shifting above bored crocodiles, drawing in the morning sun and suckers with a single line. We lie on that line too, today, are drawn to you and the puddles you pretended were eyes; relive your youth in photographs and love letters that we, kittens of your small litter, lick livdly and desperately, a lifeline to devour and then demand again.
You remain only in our clutter; in our cluttered heads; in the world of your photographic prose.
And I find, that I have misnamed this as empathy. As it is not empathy but instead that endemic to being part of you. That somehow, no matter what struggles made against this tide, no matter the fraying of this line, you are near. The patches of your yellow plaid tidy in my pockets. Imagined lockets I would hold above my left breast.
Still, there is nothing serene. I cannot balance this or bargain with anybody's god. In the gardens at my sister's, pulling back the earth at daybreak, in the wild waters north, you are brought to me too far too touch or turn to, between myself and some enemy of resting place. Time only breeds as it does with all species and all specimens that do not fall, it only breeds the need in the greenery you built, in the family you fought for and in the children you loved out loud and grew, somehow, strong enough.
