Choosing

facing south
Lubec, Maine

Choosing

Why am I afraid or sorry you are dead?

My hands paid contraband to be this still.

My mouth rotted with the truth

to be as tough as wheat before your stone.

                                                               

                                                The Other Grave

                                                Richard Hugo

Maybe I I need to read everything, every

word I’ve written, to choose to be confident

I’m not repeating myself here.

Now that you’re tucked in some virtual

file we can go back years and years,

you and me, and then too into the small

drawers, my first blank books

of self-destruction.  Is it only now

that it occurs to me that I had nothing

at all in me that you could love?  I walk by

those little books every day, like

the way I walk by your stone in summer

on my way into the woods.  I'm always, I think

on my way past preserving you.  Once, for formality,

I stopped, or maybe a couple more times

to water the gargantuan plant

my sister brought, as caution that her grief
was larger than mine, a plant now crumbling

crumbling to rust, down to its roots, yessir, now

that I’m gone.  It pulled the hanging hook

low, driven shallow above your stone,

like a heavy glass bulb on the low branch
of the Christmas tree, so that it leans with its cliché

star or angel, a little drunk, propped

on nothing but it's own sweet hanging

by and by.  But by looking at it (the tree
I mean, not just that one drunk

bulb) I would swear it was hitched up leaning

on a wall, something farther back

from the crowd, cool, aloof, observing.

                                (Here’s something new:

                                I remember one year you only

                                decorated the front of the tree

                                and it fell face first into the wood

                                stove.  To satisfy four kids

                                you rummaged in the shed

                                for bailing twine and screwed

                                two big hooks into the horsehair
                                plaster walls 

                                and strung the tree up

                                to bulge out into our Christmas.

                                That was the year I got the doll

                                that peed herself and got a rash

                                if she had one of the five red-carbon paper

                                diapers on, little dots of raised plastic pain

                                and I was supposed to clean her

                                like any dutifully good mother…
                                they looked like little stars, or better
                                still, connect the dots, which my sister
                                did, in blue Bic ink)

And talking of walls and leaning, those

places where you take in the crowd without needing to

get involved, I think I’m starting

to take that same composure, and I’d dare

say I think I am beginning

to know you.  I think truly if we met

on the street the first thing you’d do

is slap my face for one or more of these

perceived betrayals.  You hated almost

everything about where I was and where

I was going.  Believe me when I say I tried

whatever a nine-year-old knew

to try, even lying about the knife

my sister held in her fist over my throat:

she chased me and pinned me

and was caught by the babysitter.  But you know

that already.  I’d argue, having

slipped this life a mick now, you know

more than you are obviously now able

to let on.  I’d argue too if I wrote down

everything I knew about you someone

somewhere would laugh back that

you don’t know the half of it cliché. 

Today I make  your face float below me

while I look at your stone, which is

amazing in and of itself given you’re nothing

but ash and urn, a box tilted on a long

root.  I watched you when they put you in, leaning

maybe until spring, when the root

would rush its blood past you, called

as it was, on its way to the warming canopy. 

But all winter that first winter I imagine

you are in that small box, cradled

really, and safe as you wanted to be,

safe as I keep you, swaying in a stranger’s arms

just like when you started, premature

born and a little over two pounds,
all those years ago, abandoned to life

and choosing, somehow, to live

at least

sixty years
of it