Pilgrim

You chose the bird: a fat, mottled hen, now meant for dinner. You stroked her, said something to her I didn’t quite catch, then turned her head sharply to the sky…

How different the feathers feel, now the pulse is wrung from them.

Later, when you’re asleep, I lift your hand, hold it to my cheek and you stir, turning back into me, the cadence of your heart gentle at your wrist.

Dinner was delicious – the carrots and potatoes, peas and corn all sweet with the end of summer, the chicken tender as we ate our fill, made love, feel asleep, the window left ajar so the cool evening air delicate with wisteria would scent our room.

Later still, I can’t say how much, but it is full dark out now that I awake to find you gone and go to seek you out, find you out on the deck, your arms wrapped tight around you against the cold light of the moon, the sprawling sky salted with stars, and for a moment you do not know I’m there and you are singing so softly that it seems I must be imagining it – a children’s song you’d no doubt fallen asleep to yourself as a child a hundred times. 

And you are so beautiful in that moment, lifting your quiet hymn into the night, your eyes damp with tears, that it seems you are gratitude personified, and I know I will never love you more than I do this night, but also that I cannot share your path from here – that you must make your own way now so that you know it is fully your own. 

I take you in my arms and you turn your face against my chest, sobbing with relief, a wordless, shared acknowledgment of all we have been to each other and yet can no longer be. Without another word we return to lie again in each other’s arms, fall asleep for one last time together; I smell the wild sting of the wind in your hair and know how dearly I have been blessed.