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Being Invisible

Grief work sounds like
lace or lattice, but it's not,
as dense as fudge
but bitter as gall.
To make Béchamel sauce
mix flour and butter,

to work through this grief
acknowledge that it has
destroyed you and continue
your conversation on the phone.
Screen your calls, take your pills,
make leek and potato soup.

Feel that sharp pain
when you think of him,
decide to breathe again.
you keep forgetting!
(It causes that new
now familiar tightness.)
Know your body has
Folded, unfolded.

Your body is slowly
changing at night until only the
cold morning outlines remain.

What is breath?
You are inside, deep
inside, the fractured melon
'where no fragrant soups
or sauces penetrate.

The inside of her body
Is different, a still pulsing landscape
unknown, with loops,
new places for that sharp
thrust.

Night is a deep breath
on her side of the bed only.
His spirit lifts the quilt
off the floor for her. And
she is not afraid.

He comes in through odd places
just like the others now,
cracks, at the corners of
the room, the walls, that breathe
entrances the cat sees.

The wind chimes talk,
she always listens.

Now Forever,

When everything is at its
peak, a perfect breast
that begins to slowly need a stronger bra
well really…(after nursing two)

and, like the entrance,
the surface of your palm,
created silently, fleshly against mine

But like the way we floated,
chin to shoulder
shin to thigh.

Then everything fell.

Everything, like the salmon rose
which looked with lush petals into
the cobalt bowl of water
in the window-sill with two crystals in it.

And lived therefore so much longer
than expected.

And now it's the mummy rose.
dry and pink. Hung upside down
on my book shelf.

But everything fell anyway,
with that clap of pain that began
relentlessly to rain
on you, so me.
And entropy made its way
Slowly, ferociously
as the massive Dune worm
through the desert sands

And I could see but feel It's shape
I knew in each dream it would rise,
opening it's many layered fanged mouth.

But we would shrink back into the cave
for very temporary shelter.

Just like the crystal water fed the
rose. Now will have to be,
and is (by definition,)
forever.
Now of my healing leek soup
and newly partly painted walls.

Now the smooth door
of your hands cup that rub rubs
against mine continues now
forever, forever, forever.
And no hideous then.


All these poems are to be part of a collection I am working on
in honor of my late husband. Philip Zacuto

© All Copyright, Terry Bat- Sonja .
All Rights Reserved. Printed By Permission.