for G.W.,
whom I should have known better.

The winter you left
was the same winter I learned to cling.
A dormant neurosis clambered
over me, clawed and curled,
the torment of slow crushing -
a board set on me, then a stone,
and one more stone and one more stone
and one more stone-

You slid into a blizzard's obscurity
while I still breathed the blown-in smoke
of last summer's mountain fires,
which billowed on my horizons.
I'm sure it was cold in Kansas City
because you shrouded your blue limbs
in as many sweaters as there are Fates,
as many blankets as Muses,
serene as an ancient monk at the
precipice of universal dissolution.
You sealed your lashes to your cheeks with
finality.

You left without pain or panic, an accident,
enviable for its placidity.
As your fingers loosened, mine squeezed -
patterned my palm with jagged moons,
splitting over the facts:
in the wintry crypt of your room,
pinned to the wall, my graduation photo.
And, did you know?
There's only one photo, maybe two,
of us togther.

You released yourself to the flood
before I could even reach out to you -
a distant relation, a concept,
a daughter to my mother but not yet a sister to me,
except in an imagined "someday," where I was grown
and bold and certain enough
to commune with you at the altar of sisterhood.

I waited too long to hold out my hand.
Now I inhale the poison of urgency
from the fault line that slowly bisects me.
Yet to be poisoned is indulgent.
If I never held you, why should I get to be haunted?
Why should your purpled lips
and bluebirds hover in my periphery?

Right now, with this pen, I disrespect you:
by making you a symbol -
a signifier, a memento mori -
but your leaving made me parasitic,
suckling at my image of you for meaning,
inscribing your archetype
beneath every stone.

Our lessons fold in on each other.
People like us only know
how to clutch or how to abandon;
not how to hold lightly, tenderly,
cradling possibilities in our elbows
and the backs of our knees.
The rumination for me,
and maybe for you, too,
is "I'm not made for this."
We belong in fantasy worlds,
where corpses sing and dance.

Are you there now? Is it nice?
Is it a place where we can get a drink
and chat, a place where I can
finally learn all about you,
once I arrive?