 |
| from my art journal 10.15.16 (Gesso, ink, watercolor, Tombow paint markers, acrylic paint, percolator app, digital remix) |
...Now that the bones are gone
who lives in the final dust?
~Pablo Neruda, from LXII, A Book of Questions
I.
Knew.
New.
Each works.
Both out of sync with here, now.
II.
What I know is limited to the rhythm of my breath. Each breathed-out moment feels new fleeting, so ephemeral. After the death of a husband, life reveals the absence of long vista views.
Here there is only terra firma.
The land, so parched, like my heart--so parched that I write love notes in the dust with just the tip of a sneaker hoping you, dear Rob, can somehow decipher the marks. It's a Morse Code of sorts. Or perhaps a bridge, left to span the void between here and there.
Each day my feet eat up the hard ground and I think, surely walking and writing and painting and talking have saved me.
III.
What I know now could fit inside the smallest of thimbles with room left for heartache new. And when the uncertainty of the very-second-beyond-right-now rises up like an old rickety carnival ride cresting a hill, I want to turn away, to not see the empty swing of ferris wheel gondolas bereft of you, of me, of who we were together.
"Don't look," I want to shout.
And I look anyway. Stare down that emptiness with bravery that catches in my throat.
How did I not know life could be so very hard and I would be so very capable?
IV.
What I know about loss murmurs so soft some evenings like prayers intoned at vespers. There are things I say in the dark and I say them so softly that sometimes I think they are more imagined than not.
After all these months, I want to offer praise for I have come some distance. I have. But I have no such song to sing. No praise song, yet--just these bits of words and phrases I have fashioned here. A start of sorts.
V.
What I know is grief keeps it's own liturgical hours, knows its own mind. It is indifferent to pain and need and desire and the well turned pages of the calendar.
I may be more monk than not, now. You may be, too.
Hymns offered to a husband dead by a wife grieving.
It will get easier, I think.
This awful newness will get easier.
