survivable loss

no small divorce, your passing eye
your sweet lip depression or fine clean
smile all gone from me,
gone now for four years and so many
days, gone in the fast forward of
family videos, my children smiling,
laughing, learning to count and
count on.

one by one the clippings have fallen past-
my father, my grandparents, all of them,
and my sister now,vague in limbo,
cast to charcoal sketchings
that blur when the eye focuses in.

i am cast in the shadows for you, sadly
meshed with the prick memories of your terrors
and they were mine, too, but i was there,
witness, and possibly the way my hair falls
or the octave of my voice brings you back there in a way
that just can't be survived.

this is what he took along, in his ever growing bag
of horrors: children, innocence, laughter, trust,
and the good root structure between sisters,
yanked upwards and slit at the throat,
if roots had throats,
and we did.

ours did.

i think of you when she smiles or he shrugs,
i think of you when the predictable reminders
tap, but more, i feel your absence in an unsteady
gait or reaching out that has no body to reach
towards, then i pause strangely and recall
my sister, feel downwards in a compulsive check
for roots gone four years now, and so many
days.

it's a survivable loss. not a death. not a
fatal illness. a mysterious foreboding, it is
the prickle on the back of my neck, the shadows
that hang in the clouds and blink like wide eyes,
the howling of dogs at night, it is a long time
waiting, it is a slow growing doubt, it is a poison
that i drank the day you left.

it spills through my veins and drips out the loose
end roots that dangle harmlessly, drip drip dripping
out into my heart and swelling the damaged thing,
pressing against the rib cage and causing a strange
cut of pain, a sharp stab, a vomit, the occasional
crying jag.

i move forward as i should,
without you.

Maggie M.E.