Tuesday, January 14, 2014

Weathering your death


Weathering your death

I didn’t think you’d really do it –
Say goodbye to everything like that.
Even though you’d flirted with death before,
I believed you could get better.
I know that you wanted to get better –
Nobody could have tried harder.
And so now I’m weathering your death.
Last night, when the wind was so high
I wondered whether we might have a hurricane –
Was that you?
This morning, wind and rain finally stopped,
Snow all but gone,
Sun shining high in a sky that I think of as Israel-blue,
I wondered –
If the weather had been like this,
An unseasonably mild January day,
With sun shining,
Would you still have wanted to go?
Or would you have taken a deep breath and said,
“I can do this?”
No matter what happens now,
It happens without you.
The sun shines, the wind blows.
Rain will fall today, they say (or it won’t) –
And it doesn’t seem possible
That you will feel none of it,
Know none of it.
No striding down the road
(on a good day, when you could go out),
Hands shoved in pockets, face down, out of the wind,
On a mission to normal (whatever that is).
I’m weathering your death,
Only I didn’t think it would be so hard,
The knowledge that the sun will never kiss your skin again,
That you’ll never rub hands briskly against the cold
Because you forgot your gloves.
I remember that sometimes,
Even on the most beautiful summer’s day,
It wasn’t always easy for you to come out anyhow.
What cheered me and made me hopeful, optimistic,
Often didn’t reach you.
You wore your sickness not like a cape,
But more like a second skin.
Try as you might to shed it, it was going nowhere.
And now you are nowhere –
At least, you said that you believed that
Death was a void, a nothing.
I still don’t think you were right,
And I hope that now your soul is somewhere beautiful.