Meinichi

Meinichi

As a swallow, harrowing the raptor, dives

in and out of the forbidden ovals,

seeming to derange them,

only to realize the raptor doesn’t care,

goes on with its crenellated flight,

so I entered the mystery

and the mystery ignored me—           

                        Brenda Hillman “Quartz Tractate”

Thinking I’d see you somewhere else too,

I put off opening the door where I knew you’d be, and instead

scooped a space for myself in the dirt of a pilfered

book of poems left to me years ago, poems I’m just now

getting to know (and at this moment I’m remembering to sit

(and I used to be better at this) in the chiseled

grotto you’d hollowed out in a spare part of me the first time

you died and I went there to sit, and I sat, I sat

and sat there and at the end of every day the bleak

stone benches were meant for anything but my weary ass…)

I’d been looking for, after the soporific drop

of a favorite hand on my cheek,

a different touch entirely, but what I found, what you’d packed,

taken from some college library, is this small collection,

it's among your things in a box that came to me the second

time you died, this time for good in my life and the poet’s she's shaken

something loose, not the way a passionate groom

shakes the hysterical bride to push himself in dry,

not something shocked and stuffed shut, but hot and oily,

because I’m the slowest goddamn crucible in the world to ameliorate  

and I’m just now coming to a boil, opening my eyes, busy being new…

But you’re not there, I’m remembering wrong, and for a moment

I’ve forgotten what I was looking for, so I pull open 

something else and you fall out…

Listen, the you I wanted but was too afraid of walked

back into the shadows just now, the same way you did

when I said no the last last time, though how could you have known?

I said it with the outside of my mouth.  Yet the yes, the yes

is still on my tongue, where you’d put yours once,

and still do when I read you

out loud and though I was too juvenile to have you

inside of me, now, while there might be other

ways—shit—what else is there?

I’m still here, in the shapes of things you craved, and you, by dying...

I don’t know, do you even have a shape?  I have some

of your bones, is there anything left to say?

*literally: life day, the anniversary of someone’s death