FIVE PRODIGAL GIFTS OF LOSS

Christmas 2021
V.B. Price

I. FINALITY

The end
is the end. There’s no doubt
the past will no longer
become the future, no doubt
the end will never
add to the past again.
It’s done. What was
becomes stratigraphy,
memory layering
anomaly, fascination
with a fossil shell
its nacre gleaming
from the stone.
The comfort of finality?
It holds still, a relic
of itself. All our losses
are that way. It’s not
morbid to revisit them,
not wasteful to admire
the smooth, stone
cold truths to be found
in what they were.
We all become only, and all of that,
for someone else
when we’re gone
and no longer giving. The best we can be:
shy gifts left behind
handmade by our living.

II. NOTHING IS COMPLETELY LOST

Change only changes form.
The dead are always
who they are.
They are not even
our memory of them.
That would be them
transforming us, not them
as they have become.
They cannot change.
They have existed.
They are never less.
That’s the point.
You, beloveds, are
no longer in the form
we knew, you the vanished.
We will never know
who you have become
to yourself, until we know
what becomes of us
remembered or not,
leaving traces or not.
Continents collide,
mountains rise, wrinkle up, erode,
but never disappear
from all that was, just
as my death is always mine
and yours is always yours.
Once we are, we are
never not.

III. LEAVING ROOM

Making space for the next,
for everything else that will be
when you are not as you are,
that’s not a sacrifice.
You can’t help it. Just don’t
be too small for the future,
leave room that’s big enough
for what’s to come: your best,
so the future must stretch
to out fill you.
Dying, your life just
running out, is like wearing
a life mask during a plague, disguised
by who you are so you can’t
be found out for what you are not.
It’s not a disguise of loss, not
a hiding of embarrassment.
You don’t wear it only
to see yourself through to the end.
You wear it, worn out
as you are, for everyone else
you’ll never know. Your death,
it’s your last gift,
a legacy tossed off,
seeking nothing in return,
if you do it right, a windfall full of thanks
from a nameless, lifelong friend
of life.

IV. DEEPENING LOVE FOR WHAT IS
NO LONGER

How she held the cat, cradled,
his tail dangling, his eyes
twitching, her fingers and rings
delicately active
playing his purring
like a harp. Or the old man’s
wicked watching
of you eating, chewing
as you chew, the old cat of a father,
his mischiefing still pouncing
at the slightest hint
of you objecting. Or the brother
who was not, but as good as,
his leprechaun grin,
cigars, high twinkle, “Are you a wizard
or a magician?” And the other
brother, not quite,
the hot sake, the Zen gestures, bad koans,
puns. Or Kools for the other one,
the old soldier, not a welfare
cowboy, but the real thing, Jim Beam
tied to shrubs all over the back 40.
Loss gives us maps
to the attic of our affections.
Once forever was a game, then each of you
made leaps of being and were gone,
and now we’re memory’s also rans
who lost but love for keeps.

V. IT’S ALL IN THE TRANSLATION

The past is
and nothing else.
Inviolable.
All that is left to us
is our own translation
of what it meant,
recreating what was
in our own words
even to the utter point
of the bitter end.
How gifted we are at saying
what anything means to itself
is how close we can get
to everything that wants to be said.
Even the literal is only a version
of what something might
literally mean. Even you,
and what I have made of you,
even me and how I
translate myself
to myself,
even us,
we breathe mirrors of truth
all the time into words.
The past waits to be said
over and over. I’ll start:
life and death
all in one breath.

(Image by kickize)