Day Three

Title: the uselessness

A few semesters ago, I took a course in Latin American Literature. For the first time, there, I read Gabriel Garcia Marquez's 100 Years of Solitude and fell in love with the book. One of the central characters is Ursula Buendia, the feminine whirlwind that keeps the family together through death after death after death.

I wanted to write from her perspective and give her the space to say the things it seemed she might have always wanted to say. Mostly, I thought she needed to grieve openly. And so this poem was born (along with a whole series of poems speaking from various characters' perspectives).

***

At Last, Ursula Buendia Weeps for Her Husband

1.
Peel back the first layer and
the second, flowering, the third
comes off bloody, the fourth
bone and bruised blood vessels,
no swelling, no tell-tale sign.

They say you have died, but
there you are, under the chestnut tree,
just as I left you, just as
the forever falling rain of
last year, just as my eyes red
and dry from cutting onions for
your supper, just the quiet, the
clay horizon, just the wind,
maybe your ghost, passing through.


2.
Just a moment ago you were
here, we were here, circle of hands.
Four years, eleven months, and two days of rain
is a ship wreck. I question the moment
the sun appears. I am sure of the lie.


3.
The trees weep without magic
when the cold does not come. Come
back, I cannot stand the silence and
more than that the nothingness, the
uselessness, my arms my body folding
at night into the shape of you, gone.
Come touch finger the raw place
I’ve collapsed into, bone over
bone over bruise over skin over night over
quiet.


4.
Add in here some phrase about
solitude - fall comes in one breath,
the leaves can’t even remember
what they’re supposed to do. Change
the mistake I made for some Mums, wait
and wait for the shipwreck to come,
hold out for rescue – sinking feeling.


5.
When the chestnut tree finally dies –
burnt gold, the alchemy of love –
you will return and I will
weep a river to carry us both
home.