 |
| in bronze andrew's hands |
The Wash
The wind sways not the leaves evenly.
Paul
Lynch
The
Black Snow
Like a new or lazy laundry maid I wash
whites &
darks together & like any good dye
it rubs the
light
surface
& makes the white breast, the white chest, the white short sleeve
the white calf the white toe the worn white heated heel
gray
as an excavated & recovered
wound
whose scar
is
a smiling moon.
All our sins are washed
&
strung to the sun & the sun blinds us
for our
devotions. Somehow I’m caught
on the
weathered pin’s rusty hinge
and
the wind is picking up. & skies pass.
They
pass by remarkable or not remarkable.
Days I’m too preoccupied to do much other
than strut and string my gray wash & call it
everything
but what it is: difference.
Difference,
I think, is how I define
grief
vs how I define mourning.
Grief
is the heated brand thrust
out
of the coals & pushed into the fleshiest
part
of the heart, her left
ventricle. Mourning is the ritual of attendance
to
this wound: the flush and swoosh of saline,
whose salt has been mined & dried & stored all these years
and
now a pinch of it into the water,
water from the well, from the river, from the salty bay.
And
attendance depends on the depth of the brand,
on
the gauze applied to keep the sutures true
to
their form, & how white the gauze is, even after all
that
washing.
