10.27.2019

starting from this day forward, I intend to live my life differently

To sleep and forget everything for a few hours ...
To wake to the sound of the foghorn in July.
To look out the window with a heavy heart and see fog
hanging in the pear trees, fog clogging the intersection,
shrouding the neighborhood like a disease invading a healthy
body. To go on living when she has stopped living ...
A car eases by with its lights on, and the clock is
turned back to five days ago, the ringing and ringing that brought me
back to this world and news of her death, she who'd simply been
away, whose return had been anticipated with baskets
of raspberries from the market. (Starting from this day
forward, I intend to live my life differently. For one thing,
I won't ever answer the phone again at five in the morning. I knew
better, too, but I still picked up the receiver and said that fateful
word, "Hello." The next time I'll simply let it ring.)
First, though, I have her funeral to get through. It's today, in a
matter of hours. But the idea of a cortege creeping through this fog
to the cemetery is unnerving, and ridiculous, everyone in this town
with their lights on anyway, even the tourists ...
May this fog lift and burn off before three this afternoon! Let us
be able, at least, to bury her under sunny skies, she who worshiped
the sun. Everyone knows she is taking part
in this dark masque today only because she had no choice.
She has lost the power of choice! How she'd
hate this! She who loved in April deciding
to plant the sweetpeas and who staked the before
they could climb.
*~*~*
I light my first cigarette of the day and turn away from 
the window with a shudder. The foghorn sounds again, filling me 
with apprehension, and then, then stupendous 
grief. 
 

No comments:

Post a Comment