Loss

It is more than death: a loved one
vanishes into a gathering of ashes,
and still they are not immortalized
by that lump in the throat, that sense
of wrong, that homesickness, that love-
sickness--the unnameable, named. Baudelaire,

I am an unhealthy man now--
this is past forgetting, past frailty.
Age has whitened the crass lines
of my hair; apathy has sewn through
my thinning lips, has stilled each finger
from touching keys, or ink to paper.

Although I've shown the eye of each grape,
how they watch from a neighbor's unkept yard--
I care no longer about the sweetness
of their juice, or the miracle of finding
sense and hope in language--workhouse
of our tongue, long-suffering in our ineptitude.

I have long walked past that dreaded block:
can see it in the deep distance, in the dark.
Those others! Their arms stretch: their new
birthing, discovery of another light--glimmer
of each experience that seeps and sparks
as if tiny breaths. But, here, I turn--

hold my own breath. Discover the harder shades
of a tunneling absence, to wordless hues.