For Her

I did not know that an alive person's soul could leave. That it could disappear without so much as a puff of smoke while we, innocently, go on living. We go on living in Oblivion, we pick ourselves up from the shag carpet where we have been slammed, we cook dinner, go to work, take vacations. We make babies. We carry these little ones inside us, we push them heartlessly into a world we do not know is forsaken, we mother them from the shell of what is left of us. We do the best we can but the truth is that we were shattered, we were hollowed-out buildings where we waded through heaping piles of toxic sludge just to make it through the day, then we tuck them in with all the tenderness we can muster before we collapse onto the bed. There we lie worrying, long into the dark night we are plagued because also, and this is the thing, we love them so much that it rips us apart, we love them so thoroughly there's nothing to do but live submerged in terror, and later, years later, in regret which morphs to a stunning heart ache that is as severing as when the soul, our soul, my soul, their souls, flee. And later still, we wonder incredulously that we did the best we could might ever act as a balm, a panacea, some kind of magic bullet, when all that can be found is the greatest sorrow, the deepest yearning to have been better, to have been there intact, our hearts and bodies whole, filling the days with joyous singing, with gentle cradling, with the fiercest love, passing on to their beings, and then the beings that come from their beings, all of the sweet, precious, sacred souls, the safety, the solidity, the sanctuary, the love, that we never knew.