beau b

In days following your last
I lay sprawled upon rolling knolls,
Your essence dyes the seasoned edges of tree leaves,
Emerald grasses melting into cloudy cerulean hues.

In the wake of your abrupt departure
parts of you are painted anew.
I hear you’ve learned to speak in light whispers
between lines of passing thought
and around corners of thinly veiled nights.

So sharp, your speechless words,
How they outline every grain of a new existence;
Life in a world no longer adorned with an incarnation of you

Now you sky surf gusts of wind
Carrying messages from worlds far beyond our own.

Death calls.
Subtle somehow,
In hushed tones and strong words.

Us mortals look up
From twisting tiny threads of storied reality.
We weave with worn, stale fingertips.
But the brilliance of one
Brightly Glowing Expanse of Space,
Black
In all its pure shining light
Doesn’t seem to fit through the little hole at the end of a needle.
At least not while tightly wound spools of technicolor string remain locked in boxes
We’ve sewn shut.

So we hang our heads,
Get back to work.
Slip fear into cinched pouches we’ve stitched
With hopes for seams tight enough
To withhold from us
Our own ties to some vast existence

How I lie
On a sharp edge
Ready to topple
At every moment
Only seconds from what we call death.

But she still calls, and this time
With your ears,
I listen.

Your evaporation tore a gaping hole
In earthly souls
That most often remains thirsty for the sound of your voice.
But every so often
Provides the finest container
To climb inside
To hear
To Feel
To Smell

Every bit of you
And so much more
In ways that never before
Made sense without the
Chance to sense through your pores.

On hot days I touch cold white paper to my face
Bowing to these words we create.
In an instant
I pulse to the rhythm of wandering j’s
Plunge into the silence of freshly fallen snow days
Chilled by the prickled edges where your hair lays.

And rise
To find reverberating heat waves.
Rays of light
In sync with a voice
To say,

That every day
Grows closer to the one before
And new life
Is born from an open back door
While death calls
From the front.

With a gift.
The choice to listen
With your ears
And feel with your touch.

She calls to me,
Death

And through your ears,
I listen.


--November 2014
   jitana