23. Harbinger of the Past

in a long time after that short | before

we seem almost memorials | to memory

a time of curtains intersecting | curtains

sometimes covering | sometimes diaphanous

we see through whatever we | forget of it

I recall emotion | darkness | a tall tree

singing Dylan at a picnic table | at night

she | who lost her life among us

but not her body | rape stripped the essential

of her | the story I still recall her telling me

how I had imagined how to | save her

months too late | hundreds of miles distant

I must have failed her | in my frail attempts

her self ripped away | she still tried to connect

I’m sure I failed her | I almost forgot the story

Sad-eyed Lady of the Lowlands | she would play

I return to that one often | a dirge | all this darkness

in such a small space | such a small body

I remember the fear of being alive | too

the music echoes in that | hollowness

 

I spend my days | counting the dead

writing the number down | and then the next

I do not count the sick | those who struggle to breathe

I count them after | their last breath

these people I do not know | can barely imagine

trying to remember each | as a human and | a node

connecting | human to human | in the net that ties

all of us | together

every death should hurt me hard | but they arrive

in batches | unidentified | disconnected from their

rich and painful lives | each life being an attempt

at finding a way to be | just be | one’s natural self

my body lies awkward | over me and what

I might believe I am | I am a body filled with being

consciousness surrounded by | flesh / slash / break

struggling against this bifurcated person | body / mind

but I am not one of the dead | I breathe the air | I

run through my apartment | for exercise | I create

something | small or large | singular or plural

every day | just to say | I am still here

 

I have a grandson now | who started off small

and grows every day | he holds his head up straight

he smiles so hard | I think | smiling is how evolution

reminds parent to love their child | his smile invades

his entire face | it radiates

I feel its warmth | a continent away

this human | born in the state of my birth

connected to me by the need for me to be | for him

to be | is changing in that slow human

way | can’t yet roll over

doesn’t speak | but chirps

holds tight onto his | parents

sleeps away the day | to rest from his growth

is helpless | but thriving

I will one day | leave here

to leave him behind | to remember me

for as long as a person | shall

just as I | alone among my many siblings

remember all of my | grandparents

which is all to say | how are you?