Tell me how armies of ants and related scavengers hustle your bones, or what remains after weary life and disease and fire have bored through and pulverized. Offer a clue, a crumb on this hard-rock path I can swallow to truly know how your beauty faded to shell, and then less than shell. Not even a pine box for you, my love. My heart is no tiny blister to be pierced so the fluid of our rapture seeps and promotes healing. It boils under my skin, the way your touch lifted me sizzling above and out of my body, the way no one before you had. We did not shrink from our union. I do not shrink now, rather knit memories unto full-skirted weeping. No reason to look for the needle where absence wields her patient spears.

When the gleam in the basement is more than shift-shafted light from above the wash machine, where the cracked window continues to deliver the draft, then I venture to say I have caught you again, or you have caught me. I stand in that spectrum, I put my fingers in and resist ascending the stairs. With poetry I try casting your form, but you cannot be fenced, nor forced, nor held, nor defined. You slip my grasp. The sun has moved again.

The gasp that became part and parcel of our lives–of your life, your behind-the-eight-ball-life–that gasp shrouded all our games. Nothing possessed fun. We’d become the atmosphere of our own lives, air tinged with creosote, meant to preserve but instead poisoning.

My nightgown hem sweeps the floor, all the ghost dust of you clinging, a ghost- pond of you at my feet. The shirt pulled from over your head and towel that last touched your mouth, the cloth the nurse used to wash your body—I will not launder. I touch them–these that hold particles of you, traces of you–whispering your name. Honey. Nothing’s going to douse what you lit in me. For you I burn.

The heart, adorned with lead to shield it from the nuclear, stumbles. Our plot dilly-dallied, the way love will, a globe of portent and promise and wild, wild spinning, while we, otherwise engaged, distracted, unthinking, because who dares think about losing and what could be, can be, will be, lost? Pink leads to red to purple to black. Even black fades, goes grey against coursing streams. Truth told, I’m fading a little, too.

The human mind spins so as to stamp through the waves. Thigh-high grief wants to take me down, to run the gutters with me. Water can cut, did you know that? I reside in daily muddling, but the dark, oh the dark, enfolds. It asks for proof. It’s a stubborn worker bee, resisting why, head down, droning a slicing drone, and my brain a dumb bread loaf prime for piercing.

Donna D. Vitucci has been publishing since 1990. She lives in North Carolina, where she enjoys reading and writing, yoga, hiking, cooking and gardening. Dozens of her stories, poems and slices of memoir can be found in print and online. Her work explores the ache and mistake of secrets among family, lovers and friends. Read selected publications, and information about her four novels, at: www.magicmasterminds.com/donnavitucci