Monday, January 18, 2016

grief, cliched.

I heard someone say once,
that grief was a
tsunami.

I was ready.
when I got the phone call
I steeled myself for the onslaught:
the waves pouring from my eyes,
the gasping breaths of loss and ache --
the roar of it all.

the cliche of it all.

I drove myself the 7 hours
home to the grave,
pale hands sturdily grasping
the steering wheel,
the radio blending a melody
I couldn't hear;

the frozen corn fields a too-apt metaphor
for this grief that wouldn't come.

there are a lot of moments
people don't tell
you about losing a father.

the way I would cradle
my fifty-seven-year-old mother
in the dead of night,
crawling into her queen-sized bed
that was now a raft in an endless sea.
my body filling the indent
where thirty-three years of marriage should be.
her tears, oh,
her tears.

the mechanical way
I went about living,
neither here nor there.

the way people watch
for you to fissure
and you wish you would
that if you could,
if you please just would
follow directions:
the onslaught of memories
rack your body,
relentlessly pour from your eyes,
with no pensieve to hold them safe
for an audience

but memories were never good
at being told what to do,
never one for arbitrary milestones,
anyway.

so you tiptoe around
your own life,
waiting expectantly for
the trigger.

you do settle into
the emptiness,
eventually.
the dull void,
the deafening
you wrap around yourself
like a blanket.

this is life, now.

but then on some no-name day
a flannel shirt grabs
you and pulls you into a bear hug,
the plaid a little too familiar,
a little copper smelling,
like your dad's truck.
the shirt doesn't have any words either
so he doesn't pretend that he does.

this abrupt comfort
is your undoing.
the tsunami: here,
at last.