A Gulf Between

A Gulf Between

I.

It was six days after your death
I opened the drawer,
wept in dirty cloth I'd meant to clean—
dug there in you and memories of
Saturday afternoons
Shreds of fall leaves clinging,
Raking the heaps
And all around

dug down to dark wood
your ebony bed
Buried in sand so far
As I see the black of your eyes and oil wells
On fire, blackening my sky and
My skin with your soot
So sandy and gray

And I harbor a secret shame—
a need to slam your drawer
and land under that banner, "mission accomplished,"
to move on from the steel I know still moors
in my familiar bay
In sand so sticky
Like the soot
Stuck to me, unwashable
--unendable

I await the seventh day
In a mourning my mother doesn't know,
And grandmothers do—
The morning eclipse,
a darkness promising rest
And rain.

A Gulf Between

II.

It was six months after your death I hiked Mauna Loa
And they told me not to go

Not to bring the pick I'd carried since the ticking stopped
Waiting after waiting, to see you again
And they told me not to dig up there
In smoke and sky, for fear of misplaced generals
In rocky holes

Their uniforms buried deep
Where I ploughed to find you
Through Lethen waters gone hard
Deep past oasis leaves, unfound,
Frozen mid-bloom
I was a rookie going farther than I should
Farther

Until the blue sea filled my trench
and its waters of forgetting washed me clean

A Gulf Between

III.

It was six weeks after your death
I arrived in Calcutta, needing
a place where death was not new
And water was not clean,
Where my dirt matched theirs
Falling apart under white veils
And a wimple to cover me up—
those parts that poked
and pinched their way
back to you, and the guns,
straying out to evening air
where no eyes followed
and I knew you in the black
of desert nights,
a white dwarf gone dark.