She Goes Away From Me

 

She goes away from me.
We call it traveling.
We say it makes us grow to be apart.
Something is dull around my heart.
She calls me every night.
Though she left in the light,
in the morning I am formal
I make the day seem normal.

Women want to speak, to trust
with knowledge every loss,
to follow thread from the needle's eye
straight to the lucid sky.
Andrea speaks of sexual intelligence.
One to another we hold evidence.
Sewn in the corners of our samplers
we tell the underside of what appears.
Thus we grow together like grass,
wind singing and tuned, we are a mass.

Karin likens you and me to family,
our leaving like the failing of a village
without a name, and not yet mapped.
Or like a young death; infant wrapped
into the ground. What is this for,
this little life, nothing more
than brief breathing? And yet, it's not from pity
that mothers christen for eternity.
Women brought communion
to every effort in the West.
Men spoke of softening but this was less
than we intended. What we mean by root
is metaphor and real, buried essence, truth.
Somewhere in the circle of each mind
is every detail, bliss, suffering, kind.

She goes away from me
but someone in her does not leave.
And I am pulled out there.
This is called pain, called missing, loss.
But keeping this, one can go anywhere.
All I've lost is what I have not grieved.

---Susan Griffin--from Unremembered Country