Poets teach us to let go.
Letting You Go
I loved you once.
on those endless summer days in the pool,
barefoot walks on hot asphalt to the corner store
cigarettes for you, grape Mr. Freeze for me.
eating your special Sunday scrambled eggs with ketchup
planting backyard rows of majestic purple irises
and early morning chocolate glazed doughnuts you bought for me
I loved you once.
between the bedtime prayers to God
to bless you and make me a good girl,
the smooth side steps of your brown socked feet
as I stood on them
my skinny arms wrapped tight around your belly
swaying to your Dolly Parton album,
we called it dancing.
But somewhere between then and later
the clouds of anger hovered over
and your appetite for all things bitter was insatiable.
you stuffed yourself, hardened your heart
and, so it seems, your arteries.
You’re old now, and unwell
all those years of deception, Export A’s
and hidden bottles of Molson Dry must have
sucked the air from your lungs and staled your taste for life and love.
all that trying so hard to disrobe from the
self-hate your mother bundled you in way back whenever,
I wonder if it’s getting the rest of you
that never got to be the best of you.
I think of your hardening arteries,
the ones they miraculously bypassed 35 years ago
the ones they ballooned a few years later
a tiny circus display in the corridors leading
to the grand tents of your organs.
I think of those clogged veins that choked out oxygen – twice
and nearly killed your heart and you with it
your roadways of bottlenecked pain and sorrow
the unsaid apologies caught in the backlog of stubborn hatred.
We’ve been necessary strangers for years now
and I don’t regret changing the locks to my heart.
But I am tired of living in this petri-dish with you
tired of this breeding ground of mutated assumptions
and ages old anger
and the hardening of my own heart
that quivers in the shallow lips of this glass dish
waiting for a breakthrough
I am tired now.
Is this forgiveness and if it is
where’s the fanfare?
the burst dam of swollen, unleashed sorrow?
the celebration of having arrived?
is this the final piece, the final letting go they talk about?
the one holding the promise of that soufflé-like lightness from
the weight in the bottom left corner of my heart
where you still live?
call it forgiveness if you like,
if that makes it mean something to you
I’ll say only that it’s time –
time to let my mouth form the words,
my fingers type, scribble, scrawl it out as
my voice echoes against the chasm walls of our estrangement
and tells you that no matter how you take this
no matter whether you own what you did
or your hardened, blocked pathways
ever send this message to your heart
or I ever send this message
or that you ever receive it at all
I want to say that there was, there really was
a time
a very long time ago
when I loved you
and I’m ready now
to let you go
These beautiful words came to me from the poet herself, a member of the first VerbTribe community.
[image from here]
