Neither Time Nor Grief is a Flat Circle

The camellias are blooming in the rain,
red and pink, real-life Valentine’s Day
decorations. Their petals are not confetti
or streamers, their petals are decaying
organic matter that will fall and rot and feed
the ground. And whoever said that grief
was a flat circle was wrong, too; our friend
Andy is dead now, and my grief is not flat.
My grief is a sharp, hot thing that pokes me
in the spine whenever I am crabbily
unloading our dishwasher or I spend
another Saturday sleepwalking the internet.
Your one precious life, says my grief. Huh.
I tell my grief to get lost but it stays here
with me, wedges itself between my hip
and the arm of the couch, like a dog
that wants to be close but doesn’t really
understand physics. Like it is a dog, I push
my grief away and then I feel bad
and invite it back, pat the cushion
next to me, smell its wet breath.
It’s oppressive, this grief, yet
without it I feel terribly alone,
wandering through the pandemic.
The virus didn’t kill Andy—his heart
quit. He went into a coma and he died.
One day he was alive and now he’s not.
The camellias are wet in the rain, no one
told them about Andy. One day I’ll have
more dead friends than living ones
and people will think I’m lucky because
that means I’ll have lived a long time.
And that I had friends. I thought
that writing this poem might help,
but it didn’t. And so I tip this poem
into an envelope and I mail
it to you, reader. It’s yours now:
the grief, the dog, the shuddering
flowers. When you are lonely,
this poem falls out of the book
you’re not reading. You’re crying
now, or maybe it’s just the rain.



From The Anxiety Workbook (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2023). All rights reserved. Reprinted with the permission of the author.