What can it mean, that someone walks
out of your house then they won't come
back ever. When you'd had them, and
they were boys; you'd think they'd make
their own way home out of that mud.
He was like a cat, always fell on his feet.
I can feel he's still working in the fields
or is drinking late somewhere—oh I do
know that he's not & yet none of it fits.
Then what could it mean to know this.
We learnt that the line between here
and there is a faint grey, and it gleams
like the honesty's seedpods—as brittle.
But candid somehow. Hard to convey
how it seems fresh, and almost papery.
You could poke a hole and be straight
through onto the death side, where it
is livelier than here, and a lot clearer.
I never could grasp human absence.
It always escaped me, the real name
of this unfathomable simplest thing.
It's his hands I remember the most.
But that'll go. Some women take on
a wary look and seem bleached out.
They get pierced by a casual remark
that makes them harden or go vague.
"I fought for strength and tearlessness
and found both." What a price, pride.
No need to draw attention to yourself.
So many were left as quiet as you. Do
I go on for years thinking and thinking.
One in all these thousands. Him. Me.
So many gone that you can't take it in.
Whatever I say is bound to sound flat.
I am a gramophone on the subject.
Each day's same horizon to be faced.
You long to fade out into it, yourself.
I look doggedly after a missing figure.
What to do now is clear, and wordless.
You will bear what can not be borne.
—Denise Riley, Say Something Back
Time Lived, Without Its Flow
Holly Margl is the award-winning author of Witnessing Grief; Inviting Trauma and Loss to Our Coaching Conversations, An Enneagram Perspective, coach, coach mentor, and trainer specializing in grief, trauma, and the Enneagram.
