They pulled out my guts, one by one.
A slippery mass of disappointment and steaming goo.
When we said forever, enveloped in sinew and DNA it did not mean
on this earth.
The gory part of grief is not the missing,
it is not the desperation,
it is not the big, momentous happenings and circumstances
that highlight the empty chair, the thin photograph,
the dancing and the celebrating and the tinsel.
No, it is the day to day.
The coffee cup.
The dimple in a child’s cheek.
A brief glimpse of a hand, an energy, a temperament
that brings you to your knees.
Drawn in and out,
where does that anguish go?
It goes to the belly, below the bones,
deep in the feeling place.
The place that birthed babies and collapses in
unearned pleasure.
It is that place,
the primal place.
The place that knows belonging and loss,
you can’t even put language to it if you tried.
And believe me, you’ve tried.
The brain fails here to entwine, encapsulate, define
this feeling, this truth, this new way of being.
Broken and benign,
open and distorted,
clumsy and knotted.
You loved and lost
and what now will they do with you?