the fat and the ashes

It is a fat Tuesday, sun spilling through glass, birds fighting and somersaulting and caterwauling in the surrounding trees of my sedate urban forest. I am grinding my creative ability into dust and wishing for gods. I am answered by flowering quince and Professor Longhair and count myself lucky. It is not my custom to greet the spring with joy but this year, as I see age in my hair, on my hips, in old sprains that resist healing, I smile with the sun and the sudden shock of crocuses and snow drops. For the first time, this emergence means something new to me.

Until the fall, I had spent my conscious moments building my life, my family, my loves, and my home, making them strong and safe. I worked and worked at a deep and prideful labor and my eyes were bright. But then the dark months were heralded by dark events, by attack and dismay and grief and, try as I might to deny it as I snatch at my fleeting past self, I know I am harshly changed.

She came legion as summer faded, a swarming, quiet, utter invading plague. She pressed upon my world, flanked by a waiting, wanton darkness, and then she sank, spreading infection. She shared the end with me and with sure, relentless hands she stole my love and my work, bearing it away to a place where I had never, until now, thought to go.

I do not want to scar or heal or cover the emptiness I hold. My friends are dead but all we built together remains with me. It clings precariously to the living wounds of the new void and craves homage.

Now arrives this infant spring and the rolling world cradles its brilliant new flowers, its riotous birds, and a frantic, frolicking three-legged puppy. These vital glowing lives do not shield or distract me from the aching gaps in my fractured family - instead they circle this place where once my loved ones stood and danced and laughed and built just as industriously as I had.

So now I begin a new work: I construct my rite of spring looking to flowers, dogs, mud, clouds, and birds to find my way to befriend the dead. I search for my way to live in death.