The Double Image (Portraits)

'I made you to find me'

'It doesn't matter if there are wars,
 the business of life continues
 unless you're the one that gets it'

           -Anne Sexton


I went around in circles writing the empty vernacular,
writing it out in reams until it stood for something.
The dead heart followed along, musing me.

Why are the words so empty?
They echo, those words, rat-tat-tat and ka-ching
as the hills of my mother's bounty became flattened.

Each faint pulse of her heart, a wind of the ribbon ink,
and sentences strung together becoming my
reflections of her inside my own mirroring me.
I live on the canvas that is her foreshadowing of
my own story told.

There is a tender spot within the dry hull;
it is here with her, at last, on the wall.
It would be bare without her, I would be;
no story backlights her like my own,
my fears highlighting her slow demise.

I want to die with you, Mother, I am already there
where you are fading away as I am writing of it.

This letting go we share is like a November rainstorm
soaking the yellow, flattened leaves.
It knows so intimately the tree it smothers,
knows how to cover it fully in despair,
to exhaust its remnants of summer growth.

How we knew each other in Summer
in these portraits we shared.

The joy that will be my own child
will be as I was yours in her own Summer's growth.
She will not know my voice,
she will not know this fear and dread,
this Bedlam that is your unforgiving of me
as I die before death wants me to.

The innocence of her hurts me so that
I cannot bear to stay.

The tapping keys are what remain
to overthrow my first love and
her mocking mirror of which I let go.

Together, we rot on opposite walls,
finally at ease, finally at home.

        .....

(a non-entry)