verse

Much of what passes today for verse
is more for cruciverbalists
-- stay: that just means lovers of crossword puzzles --
than seekers of sounds and sentiments
repaying the time to reflect and rehearse

Losing the ones
you love the most
loosens your desperate
bear-hug on life

How much easier it would have been
for me

if all those unseen, unshown inner burnings,
all that vomiting, all that nausea,
all that delirium, all those punctures,
all those forced awakenings
all those forced feedings,
all that fear
about what is going to be done to you next,
by whom, where, when,

had been my fears and burnings and not yours.

How much easier it would have been
for me.

But this is not about me.

The loss,
now looming,
is not my loss.

I am powerless,

except to wrench from you
what's left of you

and I will do it.

I have no words.

Only boundless, endless love,
for you, my own dear little Phaya.

The agony of mortality.
Not your own mortality.
That of those you love.

Not losing them.
That's mere endless pain:
Yours.
Like their going off somewheres,
never to return again.

The agony (whose?)
is what they lose.
The loss, not them, but theirs.

Poor Leonora,
was it passionate or vain
whatever made you fancy
he would
could
cheerfully reclaim
the life you gave your own
to restore to him again?

Well-meaning time
and insouciant memory
have compounded
age and mortality's
matricide,
making off with
even the immediacy
and immanence
of her loss,
the ubiquity
of her absence,
sparing only
its perpetuity,
immutable,
immune
to appeal.

No, it was not his defiant
but unmistakably wounded
words that revealed at once
what an unspeakable travesty
this all had been.

It was his consort
and coeval
shuffling out laboriously
with her walker.

Some people
and poets
feel it
and fear it
above all else
prematurely
pre-emptively
life-long.

I didn't.

Till you died.

Then I felt it.

But not feared it.

My fear
had already befallen.

So sordid
merciless
relentless
her host
yet within and throughout
not in the helpless, cyclic, driven words
and powerless, futile, dwindling gestures
but in the silences
an aloofness
an integrity
a fidelity to what she had been
all her life
persisted
and eventually prevailed

Vuelve, o, vuelve

I don't seek
An exception

Not when others
Far more deserving than me
Especially those
For whom I would have yearned it
Incommensurably more
Than for me
Have been denied
An exception

It may be that
Like gasping for breath
Grasping an exception
Would be beyond me to resist

But I refute it thus:
There are things neither fortune
Nor providence
Can ever mend

Begone with your exceptions

Bargain with more superstitious
Superficial souls
Who still imagine
Fate's focus
Is them

I know now that
It's not about me

Tribute?
For whom?
Testimony?
To whom?
Relief
From tribulation?
For shame.

Airing conflict?
Reality TV yen
Writ large?
So small.

Mach dich nicht
So klein
Du bist nicht
So groβ.

The linguistic turn?
Biogenetic imperative?
The selfish gene
Spawning its
Narcissistic memes?

Yet you, lifelong,
Immunized me
Against solipsism.

I refute it thus.

That lifelong sound
That has accompanied me every moment
Since the day of my birth
So constant it was inaudible

Now you're gone
And I hear only its absence

One morning,
after a night of restive distress and confusion,
you said,
with fear and resignation,
"There is a chaos in my head."

And I saw it,
with dread,
the monster which was thereafter only to keep growing and growing,
till it overcame you
almost entirely.

And I could not help,
only tremble.
Could only yearn that you would fight it off,
defeat it,
as you always had mine.

What an unwise, unworthy investment I was.
How alone you were --
more alone than I am now,
for I had had your sustenance, lifelong,
and you had never had mine.
Or anyone's.

Resisted loving your cats,
feeling it would be a betrayal of my dog,
long gone,
who so loved you.

Fancied also
(oh so fatuously)
that caring for them
(like carrying on teaching Tai Chi --
another wrongful suspect)
was diminishing your diminishing life
rather than preserving it.

Now you're gone,
only their mute daily yearning for you,
relentless, perplexed,
to be witnessed and felt,
and all resistance is dissolved.

Remorse alone,
irremediable remorse,
for having denied you
(and them)
my love for them.

Fidelity's a false friend.
Even an instant
may become an eternity.
Feeling alone,
immanent feeling, felt,
matters.

Few the wrongs
that can ever be righted
posthumously.

Yearning, daily,
impossibly,
to feel your presence.
Dreading the day
I can no longer feel
even your absence.