after Kim So Wol
This is the grammar of breakage, how a name becomes not-name, becomes air.
When your fingers turn to leaves. There is that moment of is/is not.
There is that moment before petrification, when flesh remembers it is flesh.
Then there was the vase. Shapes for holding. Water, wine, oil. Or ashes. The final residue.
Full with flowers reaching heaven.
Then falling to the air’s invisible knife.
Blood pooling, trying to remember its vessel. The broken pieces reflecting
what was. Or wasn’t. It is getting harder to tell.
This one. Slipped. My fault. Fingers, you see, betray.
Carried. Like a letter blown across the monsoon rain. Containing, perhaps, a single, devastating word.
A fragment of pottery. Evidence. Of a certain kind of catastrophe. Emptiness.
Your name in my mouth, a broken vessel spilling ancient wine.
(Once, there was honey on the tongue.)
To carry something is to wound it gradually.
We are all, in our way, cataloguing departures.
Even the stars practice their slow letting-go.
In the space between syllables, I find pieces of you.
You. The pronoun is enough. The rest is just… debris. Or hubris.
I will call you forevermore. Forevermore. An adverb. Adverbium.
Modifying what? The past. The absence.
Is that the right word? Is there a right word.
For this.
For you.
For ever.
More.
(Silence.)
