l.a.whitehead

Names

It matters what you call a thing. It has been three years and sometimes Love still gets jammed up into my throat, resting there, tightly coiled, like some small animal waiting for you to return home again, unwilling to accept your passing, perhaps unable to comprehend what death really means in the end.

But is that really the word for it?  I look into the dark blue eyes of my eight-month-old child. Daughter, I call her. My lovely one. Love walks in her like summer wheat fields. Like the smell of wet earth and the sound of the river swelling up over the edge of the bank. Like her golden hair. My husband’s laughter.

What word do I give you, then? Your calloused hands and ordinary face. The pain you carried in your small mouth. Though the heart moves from time to time, when I call out it does not answer me. At times it slinks into the corner (is it slinks?) and rests there.  I think it knows you aren’t returning. What is it that it lingers for there in the darkness?

What is the name for that silent vessel inside the body? Those inanimate paperweights of memory surrounded by so much life? I try to study it, losing track at times of where it is crouching, swept up inside the tall grass and heavy trees. Cold sheets and the body of my husband pressed tightly around mine. Lover, I call him.

It matters what you call a thing. It has been three years and sometimes Love still gets stuck there, heavy. But that is not the name for it. For her navy eyes or his giant heart or your heavy one. I’m sorry I could not lift you. Macushla, I will call you. Pulse of my heart. Like orange rust forever settled in the iron. The weight of your hand on my shoulder that will never quite leave me.

Clearing

What we once were grows into the home where we are. The flowers go, peaches overripen, And in the final swelter, as a million days before, the trees and plants prepare their metamorphosis unto a temporary sleep, out of time’s grief, the ancient bounty of the fall. Their burden is transformation. In the intimacy of the forest histories are forever mending in the quiet gleam, the saintly lucence of the magnolia blossoms shifting in the cold air like delicate stars, quiet prayers of old white linen. Nature lives upon its bounty and prospers. Not one thing is forsaken. All that is taken, though in anguish, rises again through the heavy darkness. Hope tethers us to its stations, with its light that sings hymns inside the branches, that calls out to our bones to confirm the life that only ever lives by dying. Children play by the moon that constantly grows and expires, the lost lighted by the Star which in daytime hides behind a thick grey cloudline. The buds lie quietly beneath the soil, the world again lighted with ambers, reds and golds. The vine parts from the branches in the silence, lying patiently at the edge of sleep. Quietly we are hoisted out of despair, miles deep beneath the feasting canopy, back into the land we have called home.

Meteors

There is a type of meteor that lives inside the body, brilliant and shining beneath the flesh and blood, incessantly trying to move out of that darkness, to get to the other side of things.

Like the one in your eyes at times, when it was just the two of us sitting on the pavement, watching the rain fall and not fall and fall again. No sound except the starting and stopping, your shuffling hands.

I think of your shifting body as your jeep flipped over and over across the highway, for a moment flying across the sky until it stopped. Not falling and falling again, suddenly forever apart from me.

There is type of meteor that lives inside the body, restless, feral, beneath the thousand nerves and electrical impulses. Unable to move out of that moment, to get past the end of things.

An Ending

On this still day the sun swallowed everything in Knoxville while I walked, losing track of the hour, recounting all of the men I have ever loved. Conspicuously in love with everything. And yet still hunting down the moon, its fluid closing and opening in succession. Its slow revealing. That is to say I am not returning. To let you know I am closing doors and windows, boarding all of it up. Following the peonies dropping blossoms in the yard, littering the green weeds with ants and seeds. Beginning to flower by ending.