|
| A week later, I said to a friend: I don't |
| think I could ever write about it. |
| Maybe in a year I could write something. |
| There is something in me maybe someday |
| to be written; now it is folded, and folded, |
| and folded, like a note in school. And in my dream |
| someone was playing jacks, and in the air there was a |
| huge, thrown, tilted jack |
| on fire. And when I woke up, I found myself |
| counting the days since I had last seen |
| my husband?only two years, and some weeks, |
| and hours. We had signed the papers and come down to the |
| ground floor of the Chrysler Building, |
| the intact beauty of its lobby around us |
| like a king's tomb, on the ceiling the little |
| painted plane, in the mural, flying. And it |
| entered my strictured heart, this morning, |
| slightly, shyly as if warily, |
| untamed, a greater sense of the sweetness |
| and plenty of his ongoing life, |
| unknown to me, unseen by me, |
| unheard, untouched?but known, seen, |
| heard, touched. And it came to me, |
| for moments at a time, moment after moment, |
| to be glad for him that he is with the one |
| he feels was meant for him. And I thought of my |
| mother, minutes from her death, eighty-five |
| years from her birth, the almost warbler |
| bones of her shoulder under my hand, the |
| eggshell skull, as she lay in some peace |
| in the clean sheets, and I could tell her the best |
| of my poor, partial love, I could sing her |
| out with it, I saw the luck |
| and luxury of that hour. |
|
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|
