You Asked Me To Write About Your Death

image borrowed from bing

You Asked Me to Write About Your Death




Standing in the Temple of the Sun

the ancients told stories of how the stars were the spirits of those we love, set into the sky by the mother of all things, so we might carry them with us in our dreams.

In my heart,
where there are no more dreams
this becomes a hope;

a lie I tell myself to perhaps fashion a dream from.

And although I know this is not true,

God must have been human to know loss in such an elemental way, for only when you have lost something so precious, so much more beautiful than a distant sun, can you understand the need to lay out beautifully the heavens as compensation:

a loss that left such a hole in the universe,
time and eternity fell back on itself
and stole the very breath from heaven

until finally,
touching lesser suns
it fueled eternally the inferno that
splintered the original sun into such infinite beauty;

a distraction for those human moments when our heart knows only one word:

Why?

And I will not write about your death.
He spoke of your death, and he lost you

in a way that suggests forever; suggests moments of deferred glances and inaudible storylines between family and friends. He lost you, and he could be a god because he has heard the New Sun split:

he has seen the stars as I cannot;
as I never want to:

and I will not speak of it,

or let it weigh my breath as I sit on beaches burning long after the lovers, silk coiled amongst the stars, have wandered the longing mile home;

hands left unwoven nearly long enough
to douse quietly the laughter and lamps.

I will not write about your death;

not the saddest lines of empty nets dreaming of gold; of fisherman, heads bowed into softly the prayer of their homeward reach; of Avocets and Terns, windborne and bearing fire home all through their long cries; of forgetting how rough my hands felt against a cheek I never felt and how those tears, those many tears that never fell, disappeared into the places where my life is written in rough words across my skin;

across empty hands that know
the saddest lines are etched in living on:

I will not write about your death
softly in the blur before new stars
in those moments when fists clench a deeper fall
and shoulders never find their true depth;

not ever

and not on that first terrible Dawn
when the sun is no longer yours
or ours;

when light is no more
and all that can rise again

is an empty space
that waits between dark fires.




Larry Kuechlin

Posted over on his Facebook page.