For you, seven months after; a poem

I will not start at the beginning

because I do not want to start with

the past, and I will not start at the

end because there is no end.

Instead, I will start with what I understand,

which is that I understand nothing,  

except that it has been seven months

and I still understand nothing.

Seven months and still I have not

seen your shadow over frozen lasagna,

or heard the fall of your footsteps and

the clay teacups ringing with them, or listened to

your night breath shuffle the air inside your nose.

Seven months and still you have not told me

to pick up my dirty socks, and your hand has not

curled around mine when the ice begins to form on

the windshield, and you have not taught me

how to find x,  even though I still do not know how to.

Seven months and the other day I found a video of

you eating snails in Bruges and I cried, not because

I wanted a snail in my mouth again,

but because I had already forgotten

how to listen to your voice.

I had a dream, once, that we

(and by that I mean all of us) were eating seafood

at the dining-room table, and we were laughing,

and bloated, and happy, and it was

the simplest thing I have ever known.

I know that means something.

But I don’t know if I can understand it.

Seven months ago, when the hospital called us,

I laughed. They told us you fell and I imagined

you falling, and it was quite a silly image.

Then we got to the hospital and learned the truth.

It wasn’t a fall.

It was a heart attack.

I’m not sure why I laughed.

I’m not sure why they lied.

I shouldn’t have laughed.

The day you died, the hospital was

empty. The air was quiet. They

had taken off your clothes and

tucked you into a white blanket.

The nurses (I hated them)

cried with us.

They had closed the curtains around

your bed for privacy, but when we

walked out, we saw another bed,

its curtains open, a man sitting on it

and talking to a nurse.

And as I looked at the space between

those two curtains, I felt something

hard congealing in the cavity between my ribs,

something cold and unknown and foreign.

I had never felt such hate for

anything in my life.

And I’m not sure which one I hated

more: the man sitting inside those

curtains or the fact that there was a

space between those curtains at all --

that life was not already smoothed over,

tucked away,

gone.

The summer before you died, I wrote

a novel, all Southern and sweet:

dusty roads, overalls, ghosts that came

home again.

I couldn’t help it.

I was fifteen, I believed in myself,

and I made lists of literary agents

because there was a Pulitzer with

my name on it.

Little did I realize, I didn’t know enough

about life to be writing a book about it.

I was fifteen that summer

when the ghosts came home.

Now I am sixteen

and there are no ghosts.

Seven months will turn into

seven years. Seven years into seventy.

Seventy years and still no ghosts.

Sometimes it makes me want to scream.

I will not end with the beginning because

I cannot change the past, and I will not

end with the ending because there is no end.

Instead, I will end with what I understand, which is

that I understand nothing.

Unless--

My favorite picture of you was taken

at the Great Wall of China,

unpeopled in the early morning,

the mist curling around everything,

the air white and thin and pristine.

You have your back turned to the camera,

and you are staring out at something I cannot see,

and the back of your shirt says

“Follow me to the finish line.”

I know that means something.

But I don’t know if I can understand it.

So, instead, I will end with

what I know for sure:

That I love you,

and that there are no ghosts.

That even if I love you,

there will still be no ghosts.

And that even if there are no ghosts,

I will still love you.