Poetry: The Line

Between life and death …

I have walked the line between life and death
Thin as a sheet, a veil, a lifetime
I have learned how intimate loss can be —
The dramatic true crime of life is but a small percentage of the lives that slip from this world like water through your hands,
But this is not something so easily washed away
A life half-lived is still not living

Part of me
is in a necklace engraved Liz
with her fingerprint and pieces of her from her pyre
The sailor in her was laid to rest at sea
But the mother in her remains
Always

Part of me
is in a grave in Richmond, Virginia with my son
Who would’ve been 18 next week. My little double Libra. My lucky star.

Part of me
wants to scream when anyone asks me if I’ll ever try for a boy.

So you see I know loss like I know breath
I know that you can, in fact, cry yourself out, wringing yourself out like a washcloth — watching your hopes and dreams, tears and blood, pool beneath you like a shadow.

You can, in fact, survive on grief alone, just not for long
You can, in fact, pray for rain that never comes…peace that is just out of each…
You can try and pray and tithe
You can run screaming down the aisles of every church and tabernacle
and still not find God.
You can explode quietly…dissolve into tiny pieces of a life…
Use every excuse to keep yourself at bay
And yet…in the quiet moments…
In the stillness…
In the simple and mundane
Death will eventually tap on the door

And sometimes the door isn’t for us
and we have to watch the ones we love the most
disappear into existence
While I struggle to exist in a world that persists in spinning without them. Under a sun that persists on shining when only darkness will do.