Dear Jackie

Dear Jackie,

I don't know if you'll ever see this because I don't know what I'm going to say. I was frustrated in my efforts to be with you tonight at his memorial. So, I've turned down most of the lights. I've turned on a sound effects app I have on my phone. It plays thunder and light rain. It always sounds vaguely sacred to me. On my laptop, I've pulled up the picture of you and Randy dancing the father-daughter dance at your wedding. 

I can't think of anything, anything that doesn't sound awful. I think this is a punch in your soul. And while I've lost my father, I don't think this is the same.

He looks like he's in bliss in the photo. He looks in bliss that he gets to keep you as his daughter. The expression is not for the assembly or even for you. His joy in that moment is about you, but it's private. 

I'm not writing entirely what I mean  because I wrote "Dear Jackie" at the top of the page. And that makes me afraid you will see this. And I don't want to say the rest. Let me write it all - this is the first and worst hole, in it's way.  It's the foundational hole. The hole on which all future voids will be built. They will click together, like the pieces of a puzzle. And together they will form the vastness of NOT. You will have less and less of a belief in you and your loved ones forever lives on earth. I see no upside to this.  It will be your job to forget, to wake up every morning and break up the puzzle, dismantle it as you go along, even as the pieces collect again like magnets. This is part of ending. This is how it starts. The foundational hole is a shock, a world-cracker, and so seems like an anomaly, but you will sense some distant thing trailing behind - the thing that will start to reveal a pattern. 

I will never show this to you. I will change your name and your father's. But it's not even all I meant to say, but how can you hear anything after I say all that? I had to say that first. It's the context to what I see when I look at this picture. It's how I see it every time.

In this picture, you look like clipart to me. Like a silhouettist cut around the edges of you and Randy, and then you were pasted on a blank sheet of paper. It makes you and Randy seem REAL-ER, like you are the real thing on top of the void. And even though you are paper thin, you both are what's real on the landscape; you are what gives the blank space form, meaning, a point. What I see is that the void doesn't makes us small, insignificant. It is our lives that make the void nearly inconsequential. It is NO-thing. The figure of you being held by Randy, his eyes closed, and his face so serene and flushed with happiness, and your neck and back, and your head a little cocked to the side, your chin leaning into his shoulder, and even from the back I can see that you're crying and smiling, that's the universe, that sits on top of the void. You don't erase it. But you blot it out. You stretch over it. You draw all light and focus. You overcome it completely. 

minus

oh how we are forgotten 

and never seen again 

and how we work at leaving 

in hopes of burying them 

and what a revolution 

to finally breathe thin air 

and hollow out our body 

of weakness rotting there 

the fine anemic notion 

the swish of moving on 

the slenderness of killing love 

the first-rate waste of done

face thunder thunder face

your face is like a clap of thunder
who knows whether to dance or die
and so can thunder stand for you
when the clouds gather chatting
and that shock of heaven
slaps the face of the distant earth
the crack of this stellar insult
makes you rip on, a fuse finely caught
a sonic lash behind and through my eye
and so they trade off
one reminder for the other
face thunder thunder face
and the energy and chill
from both of you
fall like bullets from above
causing the skip of feet
and the deaths of many

my own dachshund

I just read the essay

About EB White, his wife, his dachshund

Waiting on hurricane Edna
Nestled in their home

While the sickly moon outside
Is crowded by the wind

And the bullying clouds

And I saw the small warm room

As a floating window frame

Like the ark set loose again in a flood

And I was God as
A benevolent peeping tom

Watching my creatures from the woods

As they cast the only light for miles

And as God, I saw the tired dog sniff

At the radio console

And my eternal chest longed

For my own dachshund

My own radio and a wife

And would my greatest pleasure be

To protect her, or to have her hang her arms

Round my shoulders while she pressed her chin to me

And the rain would tap and the wood

Would creak around us

My dachshund would sleep

With his nose tucked under his tail’s tip

And the light from the bulb would bow around us

Like a guardian angel

earring

I look for it, the dash in my ear lobe

and I thread it
slip a stiff wire through the slot

the metal and glass hang off me now

and it seems to cast a flattering shadow

down my cheek

like a black line at the edge
of a japanese print

I sharpen into a woman.

And I see the steady glare of it

The blinding strike of it

how hard it must be on other people

the parting red

and the cutting white

of a woman

Impossibly hard

and, oh,

so

graceful fainting

like the folds in a statue’s robes

I see a long distance

look in those eyes

That’s a woman too.

Smoke signals

saying all is well
always well

When she looks at me

I am in love,

I feel her like a lantern

Gripped at the end of my arm

Like an arm - catching me

Wrapping my waist from behind

before I fall

but try as I do

I cannot meet her stare

just a glance at her earring

is all my heart can bear

just the sight of her jaw

and that black line belting her in

Oh my dear girl

this is loneliness

little apron

how did she stand it

how did she make her way up the mountain every morning

a solitary white figure

in a gown

and little apron

washing off the omissions

from the day before

in nothing but sunlight

and foxgloves

and the snake passing through the garden

how did she look to the morning

with such friendship

when I

look at it now like a beetle

with long legs

crouching in a corner

when I know that lately

the fault

lies with me

that I am foolish

that i start myself

by counting on another

by wishing

by shaking my fists

and there she walks

toward the moonlight

covered in the dust of her day

straight and filled with something

private and

song like

and I tear at myself

for nothing

imagination

knowing what’s true

and slapping its face

for all its frank care

I am glad she cannot see me

gathered up in my daydreams

waking scared

tapping my fingers for reimbursement

all of me

like some kind of pencil doodle

flaked out on a napkin

while she stands 
a mighty stroke in silence

with only a slight twitch in her pale hand

to let me know

that her life

is a loaded gun

That darkness is nearer than I

That darkness is nearer than I, Mother

Holds you in its belly, growing you

Wasting you

That frost meets you sooner

And I, about the daylight

Resisting all the hands nearby

My brother’s, as he cups the air to tell me

Of the sinister miracles in space

Coming for me

That darkness is nearer than I

And the universe

Burns a trail to his front door

And his

And his

And hers

And mine

To all the rare of me

Their warm palms

Tucked under pillows

Or draped on slow, resting chests

I wonder where my lips are

Far and

Wasting

Cold and still

As a bluestone marker

Placed with love

In a frosted lawn