For Sophie
One day and seven months ago, your
blessed death took you
into your
blessed spirit, rekindled your
blessed Wisdom and shuttered my heart
against another fur-person coming
to stay.
By calendar, it was barely summer
that twenty-eighth day of June,
though hot as blazes, and here
it is
January's end with yet another sixty-degree
day in a winter peppered with spring.
Your grave - just
beyond the porch and
under the paper-bark birches - is guarded
by the little grey fox you loved, festooned
by
a Salter Path, whirly-gig rainbow
of a wind catcher.
I've needed the color; needed, too,
the reminder of movement
that Wind
(my great, long friend) always brings;
because,
Sophie? - it is like a second death to me
that I can no longer recall your eyes.
Losing again the light that was in them (and
only because of my old, useless memory)
makes my head bow down
in sorrow
as familiar tears fall, this time
for a new and unfamiliar loss.
Without your eyes in my inner vision,
it's as if I've lost my own sight; or lost,
at least, the long view I need now
to soften the blow.
And
so what remains?
What ever remains when loss
(and loss again) falls like snow,
falls thick and fast to
pile,
flake upon gathering flake,
against and across a once-boundless heart?
I pause, waiting for an answer.
All I hear is a muffled beating,
a silent yearning for just one more
blessed
look into golden eyes,
just one more blessed lie-down
with you stretched across my chest,
matching me breath for breath in love.
