Poetry / Untitled (XIX) (Analysis)

Untitled XIX

Somewhere far from buildings,
with walls barely holding despair,
I am home, belly filled with food,
conversing with family. The ecstasy
of gatherings overcomes me.
You are less than a star in the
space of my mind.

You rest in a city whose
name I can't remember,
I.V. in your arm,
holding walls of skin open,
pushing a calm into unwelcoming veins.
Your mother is in the ER,
trembling with fear and praying.

Shed called me from the hospital,
told me the news, your rebirth as tabula rasa.
I imagine the accident,
how the bright lights in that store was heaven,
and the fall, god saying, "You are not yet welcomed."
I can see coworkers, trapped in the stillness of time,
watching the crash,
the earthquake in your skull,
love collapsing like skyscrapers,
rumbles shutting down the
boroughs of your body.

That night, your eyes turned two shades of empty,
your heart, hueless,
reduced to a fractured, hallow frame,
bleeding out the past on department store floors.
I wanted to fill the cracks,
be our engine, hold what was left of us together,
but a summer and three months left us
cheap American cars, not built to last.

Like blackouts, familiar things became foreign.
You looked at me the way residents do an
old city, full of wonder and anxiety.
Tears rolled down your cheeks like tidal
wave to shore and I wanted to be a levee,
to keep the fear away with reassurance.
I was never good at pushing back uncertainty,
Never good at dealing with the wounded heart of simplicity.

We became two people speaking the same
language, hoping despite accents,
communication was possible.
Every word had a tone of complicated,
something we misconstrued as hope.

I don't know who left first.
but 3 weeks later, I saw you
holding hands with an old lover,
enraptured in history, your face
painted by some word we never knew.
I became a High School love poem,
foolishly basking in the shadow of your presence.

People speak of you as ill reputed,
their mouths summoning you as villain,
as antagonist of my bildungsroman,
but there is no light in this situation,
just this negative capability I live with,
this gloaming of logos and pathos.

Even when I am brittle bones,
lying on the cusp of death,
caressing these old incisions
I will wonder if you truly are
the nightmares of scalpels.

And years later, when my mind is a graveyard
and the mystery of these events become ghostly questions,
I hope you have answers, ready to put them at rest,
because your death is something I can't forget.

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