excision

it hurts me how readily the words come:

dad
dad's house
to see my father
dad will be here


my father


tidy the spare room
single sheets for a single bed
2 pillows
1 towel






i don't want it to be easy.



how is it possible so quickly to adapt?
to move from plural to singular?
we to me?
they to he?
a pair to alone?

suggesting at some level
(though I don't see where or how)
i know she's not returning


ellision excision
swift surgical
pain

the precision
of a moment

an extraction
completed, final, done.


now you see her
now you don't



My vocabulary has adapted
- healed -


but

i can't stop scratching at the scar

symptomatic

who could predict the symptoms?


not the theoretical expectable unsurprising numbness, anger, denial, pain
familiar presences old friends


- but who could predict loss of memory?
failure of concentration?
incidental distractable inattention ?


is memory is too painful, precious, precarious to be risked even on little things?
too busy cataloguing hoarding gloating

preoccupied with its irreplaceable nonrenewable resources

burying away for winter sustenance
lying in wait, preparing to halt my tracks with some long-forgotten newly precious treasure





why does the mind shy away from the routine, trivial, predictable?
childlike refusing responsibility?
wouldn't you think the small and everyday would be escape from the large and uncontainable?


and of course it is.

sometimes.

and then it isn't any more.

The mind feelings faculties shut down
an automatic trigger somewhere toggles offline
clicking imperceptibly intooutof place
simply blankly refusing to deal with the everyday
the banal
the trivial
the vital inescapable unassailable fact of it

evading past - future - moment





lethargy apathy
blank blank blank
how long will the day take to pass if i just sit here?





Panic
- now where does that come from?

unexpected unsettling
urgent desolation bewildered like a small small lost child

bereft of consoling horizons
facing the newly-strange without a compass
or a hand to hold
or a place to go





Emotions ambush
assailed on the sudden by tears painful distress
in the midst of the okay getting on keeping busy enjoying forgetting living life

suddenly the hole is there
and i am in it.¹





Sleep calls constantly
not recovery, recuperation, rejuvenation
but still respite recoil reclusion unravelling

refuge
resistance to reality
relinquishment


Except that there is then the waking
the return

which sometimes is fine.
Okay.
No, really.
Who could predict?


and then when it hits, the blow hits harder.

loss all over again



Who knows whats possible any more?
who could predict?











¹ a perfect phrase from paula, thankyou.

silence

we sat around her bed

talking laughing crying
listening in the silence to her complicated breathing

holding her hands
2 on each side

as if to tether her


and then she stopped
and there was silence


And now everything is different