I mourned today.
Without warning
I expected today.
In anticipation of company
I cleaned. I put out
the first fires and folded
the fine linens, stayed
low and held tight. At daybreak
the world sank and rose
against itself. The glassware
shattered fatefully,
faultlessly. The sense
of me rent. After shock
came the slip, the slow creep,
the rooms for living divided
from the rooms for remembering
the dead. It came in waves.
No one came. I was heaved
and wailed without ceremony.
No procession. I was beside
myself. No sirens. I reset
the fires. Found the missing
irrecoverable after all
hopes. Housed in the strong
bones of grief, my persistent
life pulsed opioid-slow,
so steady it neared
stilling. I hoped. No pieces
to together. The broken
morning brought his body
to a newborn edge of earth.
I didn’t know what to do
with it. Without. In solace
I severed or clung.
I cleaved. The sense
of me rent. What I meant
he would have known.
describe one formal realization or change you made during the writing of this poem.
After an unexpected and devastating loss, I wrote what was essentially an extended metaphor on types of shock. What I needed most in the aftermath—a source of stability and understanding—was precisely what I had lost, and consequently the structure of that original piece was misleadingly straightforward. Language could not approach the grief. I also felt a sense of absurdity around some of the rituals of grieving, which seemed so tidy and detached, and I realized that the poem’s phrasing could be shaped by this dissonance. I wanted the syntax and diction to create disequilibrium with overlapping synonyms, assumptions, juxtapositions, and (mis)interpretations—meanings buried under the wreckage of words. Some of the terminology of fault lines, especially contronyms like cleave (to separate, or else to adhere closely), served to magnify that ambiguity and contradiction.