Four Corners Around His Recent Self

I. Recollections

I cannot tell of that which I can’t recall

I dare not even measure the size of the holes
that suggest what might be gone

Mother, father, siblings, cousins, childhood friends
fun on playgrounds

Ben in ’74, I a pall bearer at his funeral on my 17^th birthday
my tears shamed, buried

Dennis in ’84 - banishment as protection; Dennis again in ’90 -
past love carried forward, caregiver, executor

Jeff in ’94 - twelve years, two of them in a slow, sweet decline,

ashes scattered in ‘98; in 2009 the last other than for myself

of ten couples once woven into a safety net for all,
now gone, most as cremated remains

Stephen in 2013 - the day after our fifteenth anniversary,

the one too many

Now in 2018 the loss of everything previous,
forty years of accumulated art, acquired or of my own creation

forty years of memorabilia carrying love beyond death
handmade cards, poems, drawings, photos, souvenirs

everything gone except for unstable memories
plus what clothes could fit into two bags

Due to a doctor’s erroneous diagnosis
untrue reassurances from a case manager
now released from the agency

Siblings express shock, sorrow, offer to help
if they can, little verbal exchange, mostly silence
none of us knowing what to say now, at this point

Parents, now elderly, who previously had grieved
that their son was the millstone around the necks
of his losses, who had wanted to apologize for me

to these men’s mothers, tell me they will continue
to pray that I will get my life right with God, meaning
so that these kinds of things don’t keep happening

New friends, puzzled, who weren’t there to see it
from whom I kept at least a part invisible
from whom I’ve now fled, perhaps because
the whole seemed too much to tell?

Will I ever?

My first lesson was to stand apart
never to be a part of sin, the impertinent
transgressive playground play of life against rules

that impetus which life needs in order to thrive
to grow beyond current understandings, stretch
eventually to learn greater love, better ways

Yet, I recall the gentle love of my grandparents
and of my sickly, maiden aunt living with them
who made a bed in the basement
for Jeff and me to share

4/29/18

II. In Recent History

Almost five years
so far, two emotions

Between them, vast stretches
of bland, intellectualized space

I appreciate, understand
recognize an act of generosity, say
know in my heart this sort of thing
is good for life, beneficial, like art

which I also used to feel, I express
my gratitude, give my sincere
if dry, thanks

Anger, now mostly surfacing
as annoyance, irritation, discomfiture
a ripple to let pass, not worth the trouble

After all, nobody died just now, did they?
Most violations don’t rise to that level

And a peculiar feeling
for which I know no word
probably not even an emotion proper

more like a sense, an intuition
a somehow knowing that I can’t allow
myself to cry right now, wishing I could

After all, somebody did die, didn’t they?

Somebody and somebody and somebody
and somebody and others, also close

and now something like everything lost
but nothing seems gone, just prior space

now recollected blankly
with not even an empty feeling

5/25/2018

III. Hope Grows Heavy

As you remember your first passionate commitment
to spend the rest of your life with someone you love

attend college together, neither of you knowing
what college might be like, yet whatever it is
you’ll be rooming together, then law school together

then open a law firm together, be living, working
together for as far on forward as your youth could see

Then, five days later, on your seventeenth birthday
you were a pall bearer at the post-collision funeral

at which the law firm was dissolved, along with your plans
for your two lives living a life together, at the funeral
at which you first felt a real loss of hope for an entire lifetime

Then comes the one with whom you lived for two years
and looked after for ten more, for whom you were life coach
caretaker and executor, for whom you spoke the eulogy

Next comes the third one, after twelve years anticipating
how you’d grow old together, who graciously offered a room
in your home for the recuperation of the one for whom
you were life coach and caretaker, honoring your past love

cementing in heart and mind your commitment now
to your third love, whose mental faculties, two years later
began gradually to decline, gently and sweetly sliding down

a two-year slope, eventually not recognizing you, yet still able
to name you, threatening to report you to your named self
if you annoyed by pressing too strenuously while giving a bath

After whose death it took you four years to regain hope
to realize hope becomes more complex, tastes bittersweet
tinged with double-edged memories after each loss, that it ages

changes, never again feels how it had before, that hope
becomes heavier to carry -- yes, always there, available for you
provided you are willing to look for it, and able to lift it

Now comes the time, unrelenting, to bury the fourth, who died
the day after your fifteenth anniversary, to whom you’d proposed
with a book of your writings entitled “Bliss”, the one too many

And, for five years now, you’ve again been searching for hope
can’t imagine what it could look or feel like now, and all you have
to go on, if in fact you do go on because it’s always been said
you must, are professional assurances hope will re-emerge in time 

You can’t help but wonder, “Before I submerge in the soil
of our cemetery plot, its headstone honoring all four lives
to whom I’ve committed my life, with whom I’d hoped be old?”

Then finally, upon bad professional advice, with little warning
you lose everything, all artifacts from your life prior, your art

your home, your everything except for what you can carry
with you in two bags and in your brain as you board a bus

to travel away from disaster, heading toward a beach awash
with memories, where twenty years prior you scattered ashes

But the bus drive ends early with a cup of coffee and a glimpse
of something like hope in a place that, like the coffee
for the duration of sipping its rejuvenating, bitter black heat

feels like home ground, like it might be somewhere
you could live, a place you can imagine wishing you might
have gone to instead last time when leaving everything before
behind after the last funeral

You are wondering, asking yourself, trying not to ask yourself
are still seeing an occasional flash of that first, caffeinated glimpse

amid a torrent of enticing justifications, all tugging to pull you under
to relieve you of wondering, “Should I resist? Is anything here real
enough to live for? Can this mottled light be hope’s new look?”

7/19/2028

IV. Walking Baby Dead Steps

Since his toddling first, continually taking hopeful steps forward
letting go of hurts and pains, quickly breathing them in, deeply

then never exhaling from that far down in his lower abdomen
storing them away for a lifetime of feeding the back of his mind 

Encapsulated memories needing to be felt, to be breathed out
back into the air of his life, let loose to find a place of comfort
allowing him to breathe into his past without losing his breath

Rather than suffocating, deriving no oxygen from dry reports
recited to professionals, written on forms, related in poetry

which asks the reader to provide emotional content, telling facts
clearly, correctly, calmly when what they need is to be wailed out

Perhaps he needed to lose everything in order to let go of hope
to sit down with despair, to stand with rage, to break into pieces
smaller and smaller, until they are of a size he can grasp, handle

Before he can start to move them around, turn them upside down
fit them together in different ways, begin to construct the outlines

stories yet to be told in yet another new language, not yet learned
hoping that he isn’t again fooling himself with facile hope

7/21/2018

copyright 2018, Philip D. Hughes-Luing