We almost never read about the evolution of the pain suffered after news stories have covered kidnappings and murders or cases of ravaging disease--how the survivors briefly escape from it and then return, the reconciliations within the mind, the stages and their triggers for fresh starts made for better or for worse. What if there were a separate news bureau devoted to victims' and families' outcomes in the years following after high-profile crises? More usually this is the stuff of private diaries, autobiographies and therapists' notes or even fiction, where it's ever recorded at all.
But in my case I'm talking about heartbreak, much more routine than murder and mayhem.
O the love relationships that each of us may have sanctified based on rosy conclusions reached and savored like the most exquisite marbles, all in our own private minds! And the writers who have written that they knew a fellow person's thought, could just see it, knew absolutely what would come next, when the fulfillment of that knowledge owed itself instead to well-imagined guesswork. There is no science of what people will do, or how things will turn out in the end, after so many lesser, day-to-day conclusions.
If we felt sure that we read someone's heart, saw the delight in it that corresponded to our own, then noticed it recede or learned that we misread the face and the words, how are we ever to ascertain the degree to which our intuitions about the loved person or the potential for fulfillment as a couple were wrong, or how much the obstacles to a shared future lay more in ourselves or in the other person? And are we safe in trusting our intuitions about new love again?
In July 1990, another agonizing time, I wrote this poem about the lasting power of infatuation, called
A Panorama of Loves:
Stars! Near, immense stars, far, far sown--
each one, unknown jewelwork of hovering starlets--
each a beloved, replete in its majesty.
Forces do breach and strew them, bursting them
from within, sometimes, off through the gape of stars.
One star may dazzle another, but does it escape and flare,
star of its own fate, or smother itself in strange starfire?
Shooting-stars flee across ages of waiting space--
breathtaking traces unfurl through their wakes, decades long.
©2012
Some time near that same date came this other poem, Grief: The Exile:
The old boat rises,
and settles, its timbers controlled by
the waves that divide them and nails that uphold their oneness.
Why hast thou left me to rupture away from thy pillar?
Thou couldst have hefted me loose long ago, with thy hand
unsnagging my anchor.
The old boat straggles,
and wallows, the stub of a rope floating
hopeless to anchor me ever again.
©2012
Blessed are a long memory, and better yet a time out sharing between intimate friends, for dicing up and scattering the thoughts that humiliate us or freeze us in a place we'd best be moving beyond. Blessed every bit as much are the tricklings of well-being when we least expected them and can't account for them: thoughts of space and opportunity, or realizations that we pre-grieved for a while so this latest, really, came mostly as plain old heart-ache rather than shock.
Blessed are old, timeless things--how many can this industrializing world maintain, unwittingly or determinedly?--since they reliably gave comfort when sought. The sore thoughts may be at bay now but raw pain, its special loneliness, won't leave till sometime--I trust--we notice that it has departed the way a body ache has healed and gone; we suddenly observe that we haven't been suffering that thing lately.
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i couldn't help myself from crying so powerful was the message
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