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Grief<br />
“The only thing grief has taught me is to know how shallow it is. ... I grieve that grief<br />
can teach me nothing, nor carry me one step into real nature.” -- Ralph Waldo Emerson,<br />
Experience<br />
Boys can drown in a drop of water,<br />
they used to tell me when I was a child,<br />
knees bloody from grinding my skin<br />
into the gravel of my grandmother’s driveway<br />
as I sailed ships of broken bark and petals<br />
freshly stripped from the stems of azaelas<br />
on the boundaries of the front yard.<br />
I know you lost a child and first wife,<br />
your grief a well whose bottom<br />
you did find after a torturous descent<br />
and whose meaning offered a drink<br />
different from the one I have tasted.<br />
You might have consoled yourself with religious<br />
doctrines, but Marx’s opium meant nothing<br />
to one who already had discarded old beliefs<br />
like clothes beyond the point of mending.<br />
Instead you looked to the underside of a flower<br />
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