Oleander

The poison in your thirsting mouth, white jewels of sweat haloing the now worn face that I have known since it was young -- truthfully, the first I knew -- the whole of your death now your passion, though confusion grips you and you cannot or dare not know; we never agreed or meant to meet here, and yet.

We could not have known -- at least I tell myself, that you had embarked on a wholly different path, a wilderness already metastasizing in your body, your mind, the motor reflexes of your fingers, a great and final loosening of the self.

It’s important, at least to me, who remains, that you know there was no getting off this ride, there was no chance to go back and recalculate, make different decisions, pick out one of a seemingly infinite number of dead ends that would have saved you. 

No, this is the you who was meant to be – the chalk blank ember of your pain, the unfairness, the ridiculous concessions your body has forced upon you. 

It probably didn’t matter in the end that I loved you, but I did. 

I did. 

I did, but it can’t have mattered much in those last hours of incandescent agony and beatific delirium, I only hope that I proved it somehow by hastening the dripping, the pulse of that blessed adder wound down your arm so you could – what? 

Fly? Sift down finally to dust? Calm the last wild animal need to duck beneath the pain and burrow into yourself?

I bless all that I do not know -- and you, for having taught me this resilience in the face of the absolute, wrenching, and final indifference of our existence.

Outside the window this early May afternoon fragile tendrils seek the sun, unfurling new and purposeful leaves, though it seems far too early for that. When it’s over, I pull the blanket up at last to cover your face, secure your final dignity against a raucous spring of possibilities already long outworn.