An Essay on Loss

The hour after the loss delivered me iridescence: a double-crested cormorant probing the glass lake, a dialect architecting the essence of what I lacked.

I thought, How and Why. I thought, If only the eye wasn’t the harbinger of forgiveness.

But I did not want to forgive what had been taken, even if it went voluntarily.

So I accused the lake, the New Zealand tea trees configuring the landscape into a callous grid.

I accused each of our gods.

Then I accused the grid of the soul.

The eye’s petite pull surveyed the city for possible life, finding solace in a strand of rope tied around blue wildflowers and carnations.

At the center of it all, there was a plot of earth with more earth on it, some stones.

A phone call in the pixelated room of my mind. The room scraped clean as a jade. I thought, Methodology, I thought, No, not again.

Feathers dropped from the sky, then a slow rain, the steam of the day clinging 
to the backs of my knees. What would I have traded for your touch.

When it rained, it rained entirely, and the rain revised our world.

I had to tell myself this, Our world, rain a sign.

It is through signs that we absolve the primeval music of loss.

Even if the signs deceive. Even if the music whips me into glass.

Now morning after morning, there is that cormorant in my bed, a pool of wet black feathers and his ugly feet.

I take him out to the bathtub and rinse his dark flicker. Black as ink. Black as paint on a doorframe, years ago. I release him to you.

And yet, he returns.

It is as if I birth him every morning anew.

Nobody believes this except for the others who are also visited by him. The

stench of him everywhere we go.

So adjusted I am to the lake brine on my clothes, I am hardly embarrassed

anymore.

I know how this must go: eventually, I have to walk through the shape of  your

loss like a door, to the world without the secret knowledge of  birds.

But I discard the future. I refuse its purging light and profligate fanfare.

Instead, I articulate stories of  before: the sweetness of  that verve. There was

a night we slept on a hill after picking green fruit.

The road we walked was a perpendicular road, the night etched with stars

like salt.

We ate the sour fruit and became the fruit. We shrank and fell with our backs

onto the soft, cold earth.

When you looked at me, I understood the soul was small as a grape, naked

and translucent and without shame.

What do I recall of that night? You were alive. We were cormorants moving

on the surface of each other’s eyes.