I find myself turning more to poetry the older I get. Maybe because I’m uncertain about the process of aging. I thought I’d have more answers, but I get more uncertain with each passing day. It seems I can come to grips with that uncertainty, and, by the way, with insomnia, by indulging myself.

Here is a line 

Here is a line,

A place, a space,

Where she is and she is not.

Containing finite territory and infinite ether.

Side by side. Both parts are her. Seen and unseen.

How can this be? Yet it is.

 

“Metastatic breast cancer.”

She speaks with practiced ease from saying the words a thousand times,

Thinking them a million times.

Where she is now will become the reverse,

an absence.

Where she is now will transmute into a void.

How will I know her shape when she is gone?

Both halves exist now. Her and not-her.

Both halves will continue afterwards. Her and not her.

She walks, a shape, a shade, at the same time,

Her presence, gradually losing substance until she becomes her own counterpart.

 

I wait day by day.

Grasp the wisps of her

Flowing through my fingers like fog.

Hardly satisfactory, now or then,

Until she is missing.

Only a hollow,

Nothing to be done

Except fill the outlines of both sides of her with my pain

(©) 2019.