The Furious Spinner

This morning grief washes over me like waves from the Old Sea. Remembering love, feeling grief, wishing for one more hug, one more poem, more time...

I am missing Dave. His last book Pitching My Tent on Slanted Ground calls to me from its place on our coffee table. I sob when I look at his photo on the back. I open the book and read. It isn't enough. Isn't enough. I long for his voice. I want to sit with him and Mario and discuss literature. I want to curl up on the couch and listen to him talk about love. I want to hear his dreams. I want him to listen to my fears, my joys. Where are you?

I breathe through this grief. Breathe. Breathe. He would be so happy I can breathe. That I can weep again. I lick my tears. Laugh or weep, we swim in your tears. Yesterday Mario and I were trying to remember if he was the first or second person we met when we travelled across the continent like pilgrims of old, stopping only when we reached the water's edge, at Bandon, Oregon, and then we wandered into the back of the museum where a small handsome man sat at an old linotype printing press. He greeted us as fellow travellers. Wordsmiths. Seekers. Word monks. He smiled. Laughed. Showed us the way.

Breathe, breathe. Eat my tears.

Where did he go? Where do they all go?

The phone rings. Mario. I'll go out into this day and meet him. We will hold hands and walk, listen to the osprey overhead preparing to dive for breakfast. He will kiss the tears from my face, taste the Old Sea, remember Dave with me.

But one last message from my old sweetheart:

Ongoing Dialogue

When I was a five-year-old,
Death & I had our first conversation.
I had ambled downstairs
from my patch-quilt cocoon;
he was in the kitchen—
a ten-pound Chinook salmon
resting on wet, inky pages
of the Eugene Register-Guard
spread on the cast-iron burners
of a green enameled cook stove.

"Love is a reprieve from dying,
not a reward for living,"
he whispered through gills
leaking blood
on yesterday's news.

—David Johnson

All photographs and written material copyright © 2003-2008 by Kim Antieau unless otherwise indicated. May not be used without permission.