You teach me how to wear grief:
like fabric skin-thin. Like the whitest beam of light,
intense and microscopic and so unfamiliar. In the operating
room, there is little time to blink, less still
to remember your warmth. Somewhere inside,
you are alive. I wonder when you started to pause
at your reflection: sharp shards of memory that glint
in the light. The restaurant booth with chips
along its axes, the geometry of your body as it
unfurled. The ailing body is a still one, lonely, housed
in four walls of a burning house. Somewhere inside,
you are alive. I trace the lifelines imprinted
on your hands. I try to remember
how they held me.
