After all the nights you left me in a room with the baby
to sleep elsewhere
and only the wind shifting through the curtains,
to drown out the disconsolate sea.
After following the furniture truck to my own place and
breast-feeding on the floor, too sick to unpack the boxes;
this on the day you put your dog down,
her untreated wound teeming with maggots.
After all the sorrow, and I have not forgotten
how you placed my hand on our son’s head
as he crowned between my legs
and how you held me through the pain.
Your mother died, and you flew to
to burn her body; we took you to the airport
your boy, a dancing heart and I, a survivor.
I touched your shoulder in the departures hall.
Love is a continuum
it arcs in a trajectory of loss,
we follow it unknowing
towards an indefinite end.
