More on: loss

The nurses took off the sterile white net,
tied your hair back from your beautiful face,
and detached the machines to let you die.

Doesn’t a fire, good and hot, burn back into a wound until there’s nothing left for it to do but heal?

Hirokazu Kore-eda (2011) BY THE END OF CELEBRATED DIRECTOR Hirokazu Kore-eda’s delightful 2011 fable I Wish, two preteen brothers, living in different towns with their separated parents, will have traveled across the Japanese countryside with a gaggle of school friends to watch two bullet trains speed past each other at a new track point. They…

Krzysztof Kieślowski (1993) DO YOU FEEL ABLE TO TALK? is the first full line in Three Colors: Blue, Krzysztof Kieślowski’s masterpiece of a meditation on grief and liberation. “Were you conscious during the….” is the next. The doctor is unable to finish the question he poses to a woman who has just lost her husband…

It takes a lifetime’s blindness to see one’s father.                                         —Cid Corman My father mumbled forth his violated commandments for half my life. I inscribed them on incense and holy water and when I drank them they tasted like cigarette ashes in a coca-cola can. There were no tablets save the pills he didn’t take.…

It is a fact that no one worries in the Bible. —Adam Phillips i. She worried. & she knew. Good enough makes a faint halo. Still she was good enough. She let the infant dream his unbroken body at her nipple. She suckled him & waited as lightning struck. Often. His eyes clouded— ultramarine, gray…

A lost man might pour his jug onto the sand to feel one with the desert, and for that moment he is cleansed of heat and thirst. But freedom is not a moment’s craft. Pinned by memory, he will regret the gesture and the surrender. The sullen break of journey onto knees will not console…

What good is fighting now? You’re dying. Light will greet you wherever you go. Or it will not. Go gentle into that good night. Why rage against your sleep another night with fists that won’t unclench the twisted sheet? What good is fighting now? Your dying light shines its blossom of sharpened bones. Your plight,…

He shelters in you this man ________________________whom no one knew or everyone forgot —His unknown girlfriend ______________________mirrors ___________________________   the quiet dog This case forgotten by his country _________that called him the Madman Member of the squadron that recovered Maceo’s body _________________________still breathing To guard it here ______________beneath this sun that captures these words —String…

THE CARDIOLOGIST SAID Max Wody’s heart was hard as iron and that’s what killed him. It shouldn’t surprise you that these words offended his wife and three daughters. Two of the girls—really I should call them women—mentioned this in their eulogies. I always knew he was a good man, but to hear what they had…