Courage & Glass Grief

After Chelsea DesAutels

Start this one with the woman falling from the sky.

Or the building - it doesn't matter.

What matters is she's plummeting in vomitous swirls

towards a fuse, and she knows,

at this point, having lived two decades of blueness and four years

of bliss, that there's nothing else she can do -

No threshhold between love and letting go,

or between letting go and longing -

no demarcation she can draw around herself

to stop the charcoaled edges of her bones from blurring.

All that is one thing, is another - she knows this

theatre of smoke too well, understanding then,

that one match struck in the dark,

and whatever follows, is one and the same - just moments,

acted out, repeated, patterned and flickering

against the humdrum of Time.

And knowing this, a great storm whirls inside her stomach,

a gust so violent she could ransack the world with it -

and outside, grey sleet rattles through air,

whilst warmth slinks supine in sunnier climes.

Maybe then: a re-ignition of a memory, fields of blue Iris flowers

blossoming, brigthening, blowing like fuses:

Courage.

As in the story a woman in a charity shop once told me

about the loss of her daughter - how I looked so much like her,

how she had been smart, passionate and kind all her life,

and then one day, she just went missing in the midst of Summer,

and was then permanently missing from life.

Her daughter used to see stories in the sky.

It was three days before her twentieth birthday, her last day,

when she asked her mother, "Can you see them too?"

The woman had said, Yes, and together

they used sunset clouds as fiery muses, as they walked.

When she told me this, she didn't cry.

She longs that her own daughter's story could have continued,

feels the full force of this loss in her own flesh

but still finds beauty in the cerise swirls of the sky:

'You look ever so much like her' -

She smiled and walked away.

The truth is that the capacity of the human heart

is not just the volume of a clenched fist around a nugget of grief.

Rather, that pain opens up on itself and shatters like glass,

and courage bellows like a child's kite, impossibly large

against the sharp hurt of it all,

and it wins, it wins, it wins.

Perhaps then, she who is falling from the sky is not dead,

but kite-like, shimmering,

and there's a word for the way love and pain are the same,

how they fuse in us like stars, as we fizzle like matchsticks struck,

charged, evanescent, aflame.