Dear Taliia,
Comrades making hundreds of crazy
TikTok dance videos in the forest
On too-long perimeter patrols that
Started rumours that couldn't be
Any further from the truth, for
You were like a daughter to me,
And I, like a father, but, still,
I was a man, and you a woman.
If the gods had ever tried to be kind
they would have stopped
with last summer.
You in the wheat.
Your hair the same colour as the ripened heads of grain
when the wind combed through them.
Your laugh like cold water from the pump
poured over a man who had forgotten
his own thirst.
I had loved before you...
as hard as a man can love
and still keep breathing.
Bodies and letters,
shared roofs and shared winters,
names that used to begin my mornings.
I gave them everything I knew how to give,
and still, somewhere, the pattern was wrong,
because always the stitch was always cut.
Then there was you.
Not just the woman I wanted,
but the exact shape of the woman
I had never dared to imagine I was allowed.
You were the answer to a question
I didn’t remember asking,
down to the smallest of things:
the way you held your quill pen "just so",
the way you swore like a sailor at the combine,
the way you sat on the steps at dusk
counting swallows with your eyes half-closed.
And the strangest mercy...
the most terrifying one...
was discovering
that I was your exact answer, too.
You looked at me
as if my scars were handwriting from the gods,
as if all the worst days
had only been a long road
leading here,
to you,
to our fields,
to our kitchen
where we bumped hips trying to spill each others' coffee
and laughed as if the world were not burning so close by.
If lyric poets still believed in the old stories,
they would have written us down
with the others:
Orpheus and Eurydice all in denim and grain-dust,
except this time
the gods didn’t have to bar the way...
my own ghosts did it for them.
Because they came,
as they always do.
Not in shadows at the foot of the bed,
nothing that dramatic (or, well, not mostly...)
They came in the quiet.
In the second after you slammed the truck door,
always so hard you almost welded it shut,
in the pause before the kettle clicked,
and in the hitch of your breath
when you laughed too hard at something I said.
My mind...
that old officer, precise and stern...
stood at the window and reported:
“All clear.
You are safe.
She is safe.
Nothing is coming.”
But my heart cannot get on the same page as my mind.
And the road between the mind and the heart
can sometimes be a billion miles in length.
Along that road,
every loss I had ever suffered
walked toward me in full dress uniform.
Every phone call that began with “I’m sorry to inform you,”
every desperate pleading, or breathing in of another's last,
every door I opened too late...
they lined up like scarecrows
along the fence lines of our days,
their button eyes fixed on you.
Tristan loving Isolde
until the sea itself became a rumour of poison.
Lancelot loving Guinevere
until a kingdom fell in around them like masonry.
Eloisa loving Abelard
until God’s own house became their prison.
Elizabeth Barrett stretching for Robert Browning
through the iron bars of her father’s will.
The world broke those loves
from the outside in.
Mine, mine,
I discovered yet again,
I'd been here exactly before...
Stefani and her boys, when everything
was so perfect, and falling asleep cuddling
on the couch watching the CBC Late Movie,
I got up, heart pounding so hard it was all I could
hear in my ears, and in my heart an unceasing chorus
that my mind knew was not true, but that meant nothing
for my traitor heart screamed that something horrible
would happen to her if I did not leave, and did not leave
right there and then... so I did, I just left it, all of
my **** and I just left her life, I just drove away,
ghosting her before that was ever even a term....
and six months later, after I'd blocked every
route of communication, she humbled
herself so and went to my best friend,
pleading, if I didn't want physicality
that was fine... she just missed me,
the boys missed me, could we
just hang as friends, that's it,
never any pressure for
anything else, and I
didn't even pass a
reply, **** cause
I honestly didn't
understand these things
like this Survivor's Syndrome,
where even just the threat of
an impending loss is so
infinitely worse than the
loss itself, the unbearable
weight of waiting, and no
one could understand but
for a few just exactly like me,
yet even I didn't understand,
not really, but with you, everything,
every detail, not just you, the set, the
setting, everything, everything was my
ideal, so I thought it had to work, how
could it not? But I did it to you, too, I did it again;
I look at you and I am breaking from the inside out.
It was not that you were fragile.
You are stronger than I have ever been.
It was that the universe
has a long memory for men like me.
In my bones there is a superstition
written in the language of shrapnel and sirens:
if something is perfect,
something must be coming to destroy it.
And I knew, knew,
the way a wounded animal knows the hunter...
that I would never see it coming for you,
and therefore I would not be able to stop it.
That I would be standing in the wrong doorway
when the worst thing happened.
That some cruel joke of fate
would draw a red circle around your body
if I dared to continue to call you “mine.”
So I did the only thing
my terror could dress up as love.
I broke us.
I sat you down...
you know the chair, the one with the chipped arm,
the way the late evenings' light fell in golden stripes,
almost mockingly cinematic, the light that fell from so
low on the horizon, all soft, and warm, and diffused,
across the kitchen floor that was about to be no longer ours.
My hands shook like old hinges.
I told you the truth,
or the only version of truth my ghosts ever taught me:
that you could not be more perfect,
that I had never seen a life
so exactly right for mine,
that every little external accident...
the war, swimming in the river sans swimwear,
the farm, the way our names just somehow fit together...
all of it was already Miraculum, "An Object of Wonder."
And then I told you
I was too broken to live inside such a miracle.
I watched your eyes fill.
You did not argue.
You folded your hands,
as if in prayer or surrender,
and listened as a man you loved
committed slow sabotage
in the name of keeping you alive.
You were sad,
yes,
but you also did something
I will never forgive the world for making necessary:
you understood.
You looked past me,
to the wreckage I carry,
and hated this fallen world
on my behalf.
Now we live together in the city
as if we were never anything else
than exactly back to where we began,
the best of friends that have ever been.
We share a roof and a grocery list,
have a chore-wheel that I swear
beyond all mathematical reasoning
that you somehow "fixed," or change
while I sleep so I always get the worst jobs,
take turns killing spiders in the shower.
You steal all my favourite sweaters.
I replaced the alternator on your SUV.
We sit side-by-side on the couch
watching shows about people
who are brave enough, or foolish enough,
to call what they feel “forever.”
We even still share a single bed,
Staying to our sides, except your feet still
finding my back sometimes, "They're just cold!!"
like two saints in adjoining niches,
the summer we had
pressed invisible between us
like a dried stalk of wheat in a book.
Sometimes,
when the evening is too quiet,
I hear the word whispered
that could change everything.
It is a very small word.
It only has three letters.
y e s
If I said anything...
if I so much as turned my head and said,
“I miss the full us,
I am so ready if you
want to risk it again?”...
you would not even make me finish the question.
You would rise as you are,
with flour on your hands or ink on your fingers
or maybe even a garland of flowers weaved 'round
your head like Lada herself, and walk toward me
as if there had never been a distance at all.
But I know myself
the way a battlefield knows the mingled taste of
cordite and the iron of fresh-blood lifted into air.
I know the ghosts are not gone.
I know that if I dared to step back
into that bright, terrifying room called “us,”
they would follow.
And if they returned...
if the fear came back louder,
sharper,
hotter...
I might run again...
No, I would run again.
No matter how bright our bliss,
it would become dark in fear's eclipse.
I would break you twice,
when once was far too much.
Orpheus had the excuse of the gods;
he looked back because a deity made the rules.
I would have no such defense.
I would be the man
who climbed out of hell,
promised not to turn around,
and still glanced over his shoulder
merely to see if the universe
was paying attention.
So instead,
I choose this smaller tragedy.
Better to sit beside you
in the safe half-light of deepest friendship
than to hold you in the blaze of love
so sincerely, and yet risk dropping you
into whatever abyss has writ upon it my name.
This is the part
no love poem in the old books prepared me for.
They told me that love redeems,
that love is stronger than death,
that love is the hand pulling you
out of the flood.
But what if you are the flood?
What if some people
have been so damaged
by what they have lived through
that even beside and inside the most perfect beloved,
during the most endless-numbered sunny summer days,
among the most perfect fields of flowing golden wheat,
cannot reach the place
where the real wound is?
What if some hearts
are no country for miracles,
only long echo chambers
where old explosions never stop sounding?
I am a born romantic.
Every part of me
was built to believe
in two glasses on the table,
in shared keys on a hook by the door,
in wrinkled hands still interlaced
under hospital sheets: forever-love.
The thought of decades ahead
with only my own footsteps
in the corridor of my days
is a kind of slow suffocation.
There are nights
with you still lying
right beside me, so
close, so far away,
when that loneliness
presses on my chest
like the knee of a god.
And still,
when I look at you,
when I hear your voice
in the dark across the bed,
when I see your coffee cup so
close beside mine in the morning,
I find myself whispering
a prayer I no longer know how to finish.
Maybe there is no redemption for someone like me.
Maybe there are some wounds
that even the truest of loves
cannot cauterize.
Maybe my task in this life
is simply to stand guard at the edge of your happiness,
close enough to watch over you,
far enough not to curse you with my fear.
And so I stay, and with joy.
Not as your Orpheus,
not as your Tristan,
not as the man who walks you down
any aisle the world will let you walk...
but as your bestie roommate,
someone to be as crazy with as you,
as we, well, everyone any of us knows
all contest we're both the weirdest *******
people any of them have ever, ever known,
and I, who once had the whole of Paradise
held out in two small, work-rough hands,
but loved you so much
that I chose,
in my broken way,
for your own sake not to
try touching Heaven again.
Dear Jason,
I have heard your ghosts
since long, long before that
first time while lying on the soil
surrounded by all that wheat.
You never spoke their names then,
but they walked beside you
and I both in the long rows,
keeping pace with the combine;
I knew all of their names anyways;
half I share with you, мій дурень...
I would glance up
from the auger or the fuel cans
and see a look cross your face
like weather...
there and gone...
and think, "Oh, how I did
love those ones I knew above
all others save for my parents,
and, oh did they love him so,
and they did not leave gently."
So no, Коханий,
none of this was a surprise to me.
It still broke my heart,
but it did not break it suddenly.
You talk as if one day
you simply shattered us
like a dropped cup.
From where I sat,
on your lap in that old chair,
your arms around me
like a man holding the last good thing
he will ever call his own,
I could feel the crack forming
long before you said the words.
This is the difference between us:
you think I am only the woman
you walked away from;
I know I am also the woman
who watched you try
as hard as you knew how.
You wrote of that scene in the kitchen
as if the light itself were mocking us...
those golden stripes across the floor
about to be “no longer ours.”
I remember something else, too.
I remember your hands shaking,
your voice doing that thing it does
when you are trying not to cry
in front of anyone, ever.
I remember how many times
you said the word "perfect"
like it was an accusation
you were leveling at yourself
but also at the universe.
And I remember deciding...
right there,
while my heart was being carefully
taken apart and stacked on the table...
that I would not think you a coward.
Because you weren’t running from me.
You were running from the moment
you would be asked to pay
for your happiness
with more blood that was not yours.
You told me and I didn't understand it yet,
that your love breaks from the inside out.
Let me tell you something true:
From the outside,
it looked like a man
trying with everything in him
not to **** a second life again
with the same wound.
You invoke Orpheus and Tristan,
Lancelot, Abelard...
all the men history has dressed in tragedy
to excuse how they failed their loves.
I do not want you in that choir.
You are not in that choir.
I do not want you as the hero
who finally decides I was worth the risk
only to look back
at the wrong second
and lose me to the rules of some
underworld we never believed in.
I want you as you are:
alive,
flawed,
right here.
Do you hear me?
Right. Here.
In this eight-story house above the city
with the eternally unfair chore-wheel
(yes, I cheat,
because you clean the bathroom properly
and I do not,
and we both know it).
Right here
where you replaced the alternator on my SUV
and then pretended to be irritated
that I bought the wrong sockets
only so I wouldn’t see how
very much you were enjoying it.
Right here
where you pretend not to notice
that I steal your favourite sweaters
and then leave them folded
on your side of the bed
so they smell like both of us,
as it reminds me of when much,
much more than sweaters smelled
so much, much more like both of us.
Right here,
in our ridiculous shared bed, both
of us still sleeping naked each night,
to test as if we were teenagers or saints,
where my cold feet
find your warm back at three in the morning,
and you grumble
but you never move away...
because you ******* love it.
And back to saints: you say we sleep
like two saints in adjoining niches.
From my side,
it feels more like two survivors
sharing the same thin life-raft,
careful not to shift their weight too suddenly
in case the other falls in and gets eaten by sharks.
You are afraid of that word: y e s
You spell it out in your mind
like it’s made of nitroglycerin,
a tiny syllable that could blow
the whole fragile bridge
between your heart and mine to pieces.
Here is what you do not see:
I have never stopped saying y e s.
I said it on every single perimeter
patrol where I made you do over three-
hundred TikTok dances for my account,
fully rolling your eyes in perpetuity,
but not even once saying, "no."
I said it that last summer
when you laughed in the dust
and taught me how to fix that header with
baling wire and exotic Québécoise curses,
"Hostie de câlisse de tabarnac, fuck!!!"
I said it
when you came back really late that
one night, with that hollow look in
your eyes and I pretended not to see,
just set coffee in your hand
and leaned my head into your shoulder
until whatever memory had you by
the throat finally decided to let go.
I said it that night in the old chair
while you broke us apart
piece by careful piece,
because even then
I knew I would rather lose you honestly
than keep you on a promise
you knew deep inside you could not keep,
I say it every morning
when I put your cup touching mine
on the counter,
our two chipped sacred rings of ceramic
like a secret we are both still wearing.
And I will say it
the very next time you ask,
if you ever ask again...
for I may be foolish,
but not always blind
to the ghosts that live in you,
but because I have seen you
wrestle not them, for they
are not our enemies, no, it
is the not-yet dissipated
vapour of their losses that
you wrongly shoulder, faultily
blaming yourself for their deaths,
and that is a weight no one is fit
to carry, even while you
insist we have already lost.
You imagine that if we tried again
and your fear came back louder,
sharper,
hotter,
you would bow out again.
You speak of it as if it were gravity,
a law of motion you cannot break.
What if I told you
I do not need you to be fearless?
What if I told you
I am not asking you
to guarantee my safety
against every cruel joke
the universe might still have planned?
What if I told you
all I ever wanted
was for you to sit in a room
with your fear
and with me
at the same time?
You ask:
What if you are the flood?
We always have, and we yet still
tell each other about every one
of our dreams upon waking.
Have you never noticed
how many of my dreams
are about rain?
Oh, that song you sang...
I have walked through my own deserts,
through my own concrete bunker basements
and wrecked empty train stations,
waiting for a sky
that refused to open.
You are not the only one
who knows what it is
to be White Hot
and desperate for relief
that does not come.
So when you say flood,
I do not think of drowning.
I think of the first storm
after a long, cruel drought...
how the dust lifts up from parched summer,
how the air smells like perfume and reprieve.
If you are the flood,
let it rise,
my God,
let it rise.
I am not made of sugar, Коханий.
I will not dissolve.
You worry that your bad luck
will follow us back to our farm,
back to our wheat,
back to our life
you claim is “too bright”
for a man like you.
Look at me.
Look at me!
I was there beside you.
I saw you carry those ghosts
on your shoulders
like an extra yoke
while you still found ways
to make the work lighter for me.
Do you remember
how you’d scream-sing endless old
early 1980s New Wave songs
(Another Nail For My Hearttttt)
over the sound of the tractor,
purposefully off-key and WAY too loud,
just to hear me laugh over the radio?
Do you remember
how we both went so quiet
whenever the news came on,
our happy little world
leaning at an angle
toward the war
still all
around us?
We lived in the shadow of catastrophe
and still managed
to plant and harvest joy.
Do not tell me
we are incapable
of doing it again.
I know you think
you are protecting me
by choosing this “smaller tragedy.”
You picture my life
cleaner,
easier,
if you stay behind the line you drew.
You imagine me someday
in someone else’s kitchen,
someone else’s truck,
someone else’s old chair,
and even someone else's bed,
so very grateful you stepped aside
so I could be properly loved.
Here is the thing
you cannot quite allow yourself to believe:
I do not want “properly.”
I want you.
I want your half-fixed shelves
and your overly serious lectures
about, well, pretty much everything!!
That way you'd go so soft and helpless
around those stray dogs in Kup'yans'ka,
not giving just half, but a full-day's rations,
and the way you look at your Father Sky
before you answer any hard question
as if you are checking
with some invisible superior officer.
And, yes, we are both fully insane!!!
Your cousin, who knows us both so well,
remember when you asked him, "Brother,
I want a totally truthful answer here, and
I promise I will not be at all hurt; are Taliia
and I...", "Yes, yes, I've never met anyone
quite like either of you two; you're absolutely
the weirdest ******* people I have ever known!!!"
Doesn't that have to mean something, lol?!?
I want your ghosts, and your fears,
because they are part of the map
that leads to you. I just want you
to try to maybe believe in love
as much as you believe in fear?
But...
and hear this as clearly
as anything I have ever said...
I will not drag you back
over the line you drew.
Love is not love
if it has to tackle you.
So I live here with you
in this almost-home,
this almost-marriage,
this life we both pretend
is “just friendship”
because apparently
neither of us knows
what to do
with anything less than absolute.
I tease you about the chores,
torment you with cold feet,
steal your sweaters,
and let the whole world think
we are simply two lunatic roommates
with too much history and not enough sense
to live apart.
And at night,
when you roll away from me
just enough to be polite,
I stare at the ceiling
and give God
(and whatever generals command your ghosts)
very specific instructions:
Keep him breathing.
Keep him laughing.
Keep him here.
If that means
I get to be only this close...
my coffee cup touching yours,
you still dutifully braiding my hair,
an "us" in everything but name...
welllll, and that one other thing, sigh,
then I will take it,
and I will call it joy.
But know this, Коханий:
I am not content
because I do not want more.
I am content
because I refuse
to punish you
for the wounds
someone else gave you.
You say
maybe there is no redemption
for someone like you.
I say
redemption is not a medal
like the ones you have earned.
It is the quiet fact
that after everything,
you are still capable
of standing guard
at the edge of my happiness,
even when you are not convinced
you deserve to share it.
That, to me,
is already a miracle.
Or, if you prefer your snobby (kidding!) Latin...
Our Miraculum,
OUR Object of Wonder.
And if someday,
we roll far tooo close in this 13th-century bed, and again
find ourselves drowning in golden wheat & each other,
and you turn your head in the inky black night
and finally let that tiny, dangerous word
fall out of your mouth...
y e s
... I will be there,
not as any absolution,
not as your cure,
but as the grown woman,
for I am not a child,
who knows every reason
you think you shouldn’t,
and loves you
for the fact
that you
still
just
might.
p.s.
As my first postscript, my first in English,
Your mind always understood, it was your
heart that was delusional and mad, driven
that way by too many lessons that intimacy
is just another word for pain.
And you didn't choose this, so I couldn't
really be angry and honest both over a thing
lacking any culpability, but I saw more clearly
than any therapist or group not just the crux,
but the entire problem, which was not accusation
but mere diagnosis, that you didn't end things, no,
it was the fact, the inescapable fact, that you
trusted more in fear that you did in love, and
to repeat, you trust more in fear that you're able
to trust in love, and that fact was this huge boulder
in front of us both in a tunnel that neither of us
could shrink ourselves small enough to squeeze
past that...
But you also, when you started getting
these feelings that something terrible would happen
to me, there was one thing you just forgot to try:
telling me, just talking to me about it, My Sunshine,
and these songs, I have listened to them one-hundred
thousand times just today somehow alone, mmhmm...
can you listen to both for me once, while really listening?
Skydiggers - I'm Wondering & Cash Brothers - Near To Me
https://tinyurl.com/ImWonderin
When things are perfect, the panic tells you a saber-tooth tiger is coming, so you sabotage the bliss yourself because the agony of waiting for the blow is worse than delivering the blow yourself.
*