Tod/Kinder/Frau

I knew from the first night I cried to you,heaving out a harried, ancient fearhow you turned, ashamed for me at the flush of my questionsclanging and fuchsia in the waning light I knewI never even had to gather the courage

That an anydayslong journey to that patch of land would find it fallowand on return, find sympathy with none

That life is a falling, however brief its terror, that will alwaysvise stunning, total, immediate around my shoulders

You could hold me for a hundred years I think, and the secondthe walls of your embrace fell I’d start up again, screaminglike you had never even touched me, a ravaged Troy bent overthe altar of my own profound ache, my wails going velvetinto the hot, crazed fur of the animal I lay with when I lay there

There, where nothing can stand for purchase, or to frictioneven the smallest of limpstick seconds to flame, Therewhere maybe you really are doing everything you canand it’s in me the want is endless, gaping, obscenethe reason I hate the center of myself is the beat of her please!

To fall asleep I imagine plummeting ever downpast everyone I’ve ever loved withouteven a moment to wave (not that I would)even a second to register what expression flashes over their faces(yes, just one for all of them, I decide as I drop)

As I pick up speed with the quick-sketch skids of free-fallthrough a life so thoroughly lethargized by grief, a despair so limpidso indelibly, blackly burnt into the terracotta belt of the urn that standswhere there are no words left,stolid before my son

My son, who may have never even lived a dayslurps a breath straight from Death's beak,a cygnet angelic in his hiccupy greedDo I have time to smile, to watch as he cranes his neck?his eyes go wide, tongue taut and curled like his mother'sto puzzle out what happened here

Why, he can see so clearly, look!here, through the ridged glass! he turns and remarks to no one,that clean through the clay, there, on the other side

Not a door, but see now a window pastwhich so still and softly she will plunge, with only the smallest breathof a kiss for his begging that, but for a corpsen handdragging my curls from under the sash of the nursery pane,you could for a moment believe her the wind