I Married the Winter Sky
- photo by Mary Schwalm http://maryschwalm.wordpress.com
At last, autumn has turned back into spring.
I don’t know where the days went. I only remember the nights, a long blur of harsh lights, moving shadows and terrible, terrible longing. One morning I lost my place and for just a few seconds, I felt the black silk of your hair whispering through my fingers. I tried to tighten my grip and hold it, but then I opened my eyes and saw that nothing had changed at all.
You’re still gone.
In bed I twist and turn from no particular discomfort but you. So I sit up, then fall back to my pillow, and wait for sleep to kidnap me and take me to where you are. Half awake is half alive, but this is only half a life without you. It still feels too big for me and my simple plans: You. And then my death.
I like to drive after 3 a.m., when there’s more ghosts on the road than cars. In winter, the naked trees claw for the purple sky until I feel I’m reaching toward you. I want to slide my hand along the passenger seat and feel your leg there, just once, just once, warm and smooth and familiar, just once.
Somewhere, you are someone’s fact of life and nothing more. You’re just another voice on his phone, just another face in the morning light, just another thigh pressed to his palm. Another person he makes dinner plans with, or sits with at a stoplight on a misty evening, watching the windshield wipers brisk away the droplets.
Life carried you right past me, and into his arms. I exist now like a tree that’s been struck by lightning.
I could marry the sky for sharing you with me, for the clouds that bring the rain that leaves the streets, the grass, and the trees smelling the way the whole world did the last time I saw you. I could marry the moon in winter, in the killer cold before the dawn, where the radio towers pulse dim and red while old, neglected songs from another world pour into silent boxes and evaporate as we sleep.
But I lay awake and listen to the forgotten, melodic whispers, as lost and lonesome as me, because I stayed and time left, and it took away everything I wouldn’t have missed if only it had left you behind. But you went away too.
I’ve explained what I feel. Can’t explain why I feel it. For years I kept planning my next move, as though I had one. You became bigger, and I became smaller, the longer that we were apart. The old songs, I can’t lose them. The old places, I can’t leave them. The old memories, I can’t let go of them, even to stop the rest of my world from crumbling.
What have you done to me?
What have you done to me?
– 2004 –
NOTES: I cannot remember exactly when I wrote this. 2003 or 2004. Some lines go back as far as 1993 and 1994, as shards of unfinished poetry I once scribbled in an old black notebook. The part about driving after 3 a.m. is true. In the early days of my marriage, I often got restless and snuck out of the house while the wife and baby slept. A local classical music station played these slow, sad symphonies at that time of the night/morning and I’d play it while I drove around aimlessly, gazing at naked tree branches framed against the purple winter skies. It created a peculiar melancholy inside me that I always tried so hard (too hard) to capture in writing. It took me 10 years to get this close.
~ B.
