Grief zone

Grief is not a standard time, nor is there daylight savings. "To save" is not in question.


You can't save memories the way you do money, through the abstraction of direct deposit. Depression remains not as fact but as fear, an impacted tooth that's not likely to break the gum's surface, but sends signals to the nerves.


Lilith was so stressed by a vaccination that the vet tech's hand was smeared with her blood. Her bandage was blue, with sparkles. I bought pill pockets so the cat would ingest her fluoxetine. Inappropriate peeing termed "behavioral."


It's not that we lose philosophy when history shrinks, but that philosophy lodges in detail. Or in the verb form "shuffle walk" (Marie Hara) that catches my student's voice where he expects a comma to intervene.


One student thought the prose poem was about a "normal person," and then she realized the speaker was homeless.


Marie's daughter says she was briefly in memory care, where she mothered everyone. To care for memory is still to lose it, name by noun by sense of direction. The renovated palace of memory is more internet than synapse, a fund sent off-shore to evade taxes. Each incident is an evasion, blood-letting in the corner of a ballroom denoting the anecdote you mangle as you tell it. The anecdote of origin is most inclined toward bending. He fired the aide who talked about his family, then tweeted out a classified photograph.


An error occurred while trying to save this post. A saved post is only saved in the sense that it remains on the internet. The error is not one of commission or omission. It is nearly as mysterious as death, but less serrated.


"Poetry reaches the unsaid, and leaves it unsaid," writes Etel Adnan. So many reasons to unsay, to move from "crayon" to "clown," from "crumpled" to "crumbled." Watch how the letters bob and weave on the chart, think how you wish you could distinguish the G from the C at several paces. Did she work with the homeless? one student asked.


The surprise is in the strength of the loss. She reads her mother's diary, about her mother. I write to her to ask her to lunch. We do not replace each other the way one cat replaces the last. S opened Tortilla's ashes the other day; his grandfather's sit on the piano in a box. He wonders what will happen when he can't lean on his parents. The way we catch on a bit of bone among the ashes. It signifies very little.