...Can you hear the floorboards crying, in a room on the second floor ... tapin/john

Kindred Spirits Twice-Removed

I am remembering, long-last,
a woman I knew and so-admired,
being stunned one day to find her
hold up in her tiny city apartment,
face down, flesh melting to the pillowslip
refusing to lift her head, congealed like wax,
unwilling, or unable, to rise to any occasion,
for even a walk around the lakes,
in a land with 10,000 to choose from.

Now, in a land of fewer but greater lakes,
I find myself confronting this same woman,
the person I thought I knew in the mirror,
held up in the same fashion, in a tiny house,
Havisham'd, weighted with grief and loss,
choking on the dust motes, unable to see the light,
rising for one last trip to the great lake,
its perimeter impossible to stroll around,
but an insistent call to lie in waves of darkness.