When I Look Back You Are Gone

 

Young Mother in the Grotto
Auguste Rodin
1885-1891

When I Look Back You Are

 

Gone

 

 

It’s hard to describe extreme pain, and the pain

of cancer has an otherworldly intimacy that makes

it almost impervious to words. It feels like existence

itself is eating you.

                        Christian Wiman

                        Zero at the Bone

                                    Fifty Entries Against

                                    Despair

 

To save you

they took my labor up

into a tiny vial

like a spinal

 

and delivered

you down the chamber

alone as the blind

Orpheus whose fingers

 

gripped the hard harp

bone & whose breath

was held, obviously

stoppered

 

for the one song the only

charm

it was the old lament

and the gods

 

were wrong in believing

they couldn’t be so

moved by human

suffering they’d let go

 

their own

grip.  But they did.  It was

the oxy

song of the day.  A lotus.

 

And they didn’t

even feel her

slip down and away they didn’t

even feel the breeze

 

of anything but song

crossing their marble

lips. 

They didn’t

 

wake until the chamber’s

throat & mouth was scraped,

and, falling, (I’d like to

think he fell,

 

like Icarus) tried to

regain his body

and succeeded

only to regain his gaze.

 

She became mist

again and cold on his limbs

and gone.  The wound

of his fall was opening

 

out, and into its breech

the umbilical

snake twined about his feet

& fingers like binds

 

like living lambs who give in

to the small walls

of their frenzied surrender

until thin slips

 

of themselves are twisted

into strings, and thicker

with every twist of insisting

labor.