Do not ask us our story.
There are things
that cannot be held in telling —
the way certain mornings
carry the temperature of years ago,
arriving without permission,
settling on the skin
like weather from another life.
Do not ask us to arrange what happened
into sentences.
Sentences have endings.
What we carry
has not learned
to end.
We have pressed it between pages.
We have gone on.
We have learned to fill the hours
with all the ordinary devotions —
bread, and the buying of bread,
windows opened in the morning,
closed again at night,
the small negotiations of a life
that continues.
And we have thought, sometimes:
perhaps now it is over.
Perhaps the season has finally completed itself
and what was bright and living
has become simply dust,
and dust has become
simply air.
But then someone speaks a name —
just a name,
passing between two strangers
in a corridor,
on a bus,
at the back of an ordinary room —
and we stop.
Not from grief.
Not from grief exactly.
But from something older than grief,
something that precedes
the words we use
for what happens to us
when we lose.
—
We have learned something
about dried flowers.
How they are not dead
in the way we first believed.
How they have only completed
the part of themselves
that required water,
that required the slow negotiation
of root and earth and sunlight —
and have kept
everything else.
The shape.
The color, gone a little amber, a little past.
And the scent, quiet now,
living in the interior of things,
until something disturbs the air
and it rises,
not like memory —
memory is too deliberate a word —
but like the body’s own knowledge,
deeper than thought,
closer to instinct,
the way we know rain is coming
before a single drop has fallen.
—
There are rivers that go underground.
We have studied them —
how they disappear into rock,
into darkness,
into the long geology of earth,
and travel without sky,
without light,
without anyone to witness their going.
And how they emerge again
somewhere distant,
spring-fed,
cold and clear
and moving,
as if they never stopped.
We think now that grief
may work this way.
That it does not end
but learns to travel
in a different medium.
Underground.
Out of sight.
Still moving.
—
The stars do not know
they are being seen.
Light leaves a source —
some burning thing,
some enormous brief fire
in the dark —
and travels
for longer than any human word
for distance can hold,
and arrives
at the eye of someone
who was not yet born
when the journey began.
We think of this when the name is spoken.
How what travels between us
may have left its source
long ago,
and still be arriving.
Still, even now,
crossing the dark
between one life
and another.
Still carrying what it was sent with.
—
Some things cannot be told.
Not because they are secret —
we are not speaking of secrets.
But because telling requires
a before and an after,
a cause and its consequence,
a shape that can be followed
from one end to the other.
And what we hold
has no such shape.
It is more like
a quality of light
at a particular hour.
It is more like
the way a room changes
when the last person
who understood its particular silence
has left it.
It is more like
the pause at the center of music
that is itself
a form of sound.
We are not asking for your sympathy.
We are not asking to be understood.
We are only saying:
there are dried flowers here.
If you are close enough,
you may notice something —
a sweetness, old and present,
arriving without announcement,
belonging to no one
you can see.
—
There are mountains
that remember everything.
Snow that fell in a century
no living person witnessed —
it is still there,
compressed in the glaciers,
in the blue silence
of ancient ice.
Atmospheres
from before we arrived
to disturb them —
still there,
still trapped
in the rings of old trees,
in the patience of sediment,
in the long memory
of water.
The earth does not forget.
It only changes the form
in which it keeps things.
We have taken some comfort in this.
In the understanding
that nothing of consequence
is ever simply lost.
That it moves —
from living to dried,
from presence to fragrance,
from voice to the echo
a voice leaves
in a particular room.
—
Do not ask us our story.
We have lived inside it
too long
to arrange it from the outside.
We know only this:
that there are mornings
when the light arrives
at an angle
we recognize from years ago —
and something in us
rises.
Not grief.
Not joy.
Something without a single name,
something that contains
both,
something that the dried flower knows
and we are only now
beginning to learn —
that to persist
is not the same
as to fail to end.
That some things complete themselves
and then continue,
in the way of fragrance,
in the way of light,
in the way of water
finding its path
underground.
—
And when the name is spoken —
just the name,
just that ordinary word
that someone once answered to,
that once called a person
back into a room —
we do not fall.
We stand.
We stand and we feel
what rises:
not sorrow only,
but the whole of it —
the particular way a life
filled the air around it,
the specific weather
of a singular presence,
the smell of everything
that cannot be carried forward
except in this way,
except in this rising,
this brief and faithful
fragrance
that says:
here.
It was here.
It was real.
And it is still —
in some form we do not have words for —
still.
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