In memory of friends lost, and in honor of loved ones left behind:
A Deeper Well
by Donna Trussell
My husband’s pallbearers
have thick, pink faces
and the luxury of grief.
I can’t make a sound.
The house gels around me.
I get up, I go looking
at the white shoes of spring.
Choose ten. Buy none.
Wine digs a deeper
well, but I drink
and fold into the waxleaf
bushes of last summer,
a trip we did not take,
instead lounging
in the evening air
with a day-for-night moon
and wind strong enough
to drown out the howling
coyotes and the cries
of their prey.
First published in Tar River Poetry
Reprinted in What’s Right About What’s Wrong
Moving and lovely. A vivid rendering of loss.
Thank you.
Pamela
http://pamelavillars.wordpress.com
Thank you Pamela. It’s been a hard couple of months. Two friends – both younger than me – died.
One friend was there for me when I was diagnosed with ovarian cancer in 2001. A year later she got breast cancer. Early on she told me she would die of it. “How can you say that?” I said. “I would give anything to have your cancer type, stage and survival statistics instead of my own.” She looked off to the side and said softly, “I don’t know how I know. I just know.”
The other friend was in perfect health. At the gym she dropped dead of an aneurysm/AVM. She left behind a husband and two teenage girls she adored.
People worry about the husband who goes to his wife’s grave every day. Not me. She was the love of his life.
It is hard. I haven’t experienced those kinds of losses but have worked with – and loved – those who have, and seen the grief. Of course, your poetry brings up the losses that are mine.
Grieving for the love of your life is endless. We shouldn’t expect it to be any different.
I always think of Gibran’s On Joy and Sorrow:
Your joy is your sorrow unmasked.
And the selfsame well from which your laughter rises was often times filled with your tears.
And how else can it be?
The deeper that sorrow carves into your being, the more joy you can contain.
You know the rest.