Eight Years On

Eight Years On

Shutting your eyes from the spectacle you
Saw not darkness but
Nothing

On which doors were opening

                                        W. S. Merwin
                                        "Pieces For Other Lives"

There’s that gap, a secrecy so vast

it's a breach we stand at the edge of

watching, waiting

while our children and mothers

turn away from us

and into it and the space

where the quiet is roused out of God’s loneliness.

This is the cleaving I still feel

today, the way your hand gripped

my hair, a tallis

of consecrated cloth.  

And when it started to tear

the sound was inaudible as a pall

on your urn that whole night

of sitting.

I'd watched you and watched you

as they wheeled you down

the corridor toward I didn’t know where— 

I didn’t know then

if I’d ever see you again—

And the cloth of us

it was curtain

the holy of holies

rent in two.

And in the space between the two pieces

a scream silent as a tulip bulb

in November