When you died by your hand
I carried you into the mountains of my mind
and buried you there in marble.
I gave you a cathedral of winter.
Candles of ice.
The slow blue language of saints.
I washed your human mouth from memory
until it no longer laughed crookedly at my bad jokes,
until your temper no longer struck sparks against the kitchen walls,
until your restless feet no longer wandered barefoot at midnight
through rooms full of sleeping flowers.
I removed from you every earthly thing.
Like a coward polishing a gravestone,
I polished your sorrow
until I could see my own face inside it.
And for decades afterward
I guarded you from life itself.
I would not let the rain touch you.
I would not let dust gather in your hair.
I would not let anyone remember
that sometimes you were impatient,
or frightened,
or so alive with fury
you could darken a whole summer afternoon.
No.
I chained you above me like a frozen moon,
because I thought grief was a church
and guilt its only faithful bell.
But the dead are not marble.
The dead are loose in the earth.
They are in coffee stains and unwashed sweaters,
in half-finished sentences,
in the smell of cold air entering a warm house,
in grocery lists folded inside old coat pockets,
in the sudden laughter that escapes us
before sorrow remembers our name.
And one morning
after all those years of dragging your statue through my blood,
I saw you again—
not as the holy wound I made of you,
but as the girl who once turned toward me
with sunlight caught in her teeth.
Human again.
Beautiful because you could break.
Beautiful because you did.
Then the marble cracked.
Winter entered the cathedral
and carried everything away,
cracking that towering pedestal
I perched you upon that you
never, ever wanted to be on...
And there you were at last:
not a saint,
not a ghost,
not my punishment,
but only my Only Love—
standing briefly in the tall grass of the world
before the Four Winds moved through you
and called you onward.