Kintsugi

As always, she leaves as she arrives: without ceremony.

Her voice dry and deadpan laments

how her hale dwarfed her son’s sickly stamina

as she hauls her heavy luggage into Your car.

You respond, quick with a quip

her skin’s bloom became wilt

but You felt her bones should forestall frailty.

You took the bait, and she’s ready

to bob and weave

returning with a haymaker.

Even if bones withered to dust

she would always hoist more

than Your lethargic self. Ding ding.

These are skirmishes,

fought beyond the bitter end

armed with voices loaded with

crass jokes, witty retorts, and vulgar escalations

accompanied with feast and frolic

birth laughs neither contender believed

would ever endure existence.

Yet You can’t ignore Your paunch,

or the dithers therein,

Bowels suffocating solace

into taut strained smiles.

You feel the ground quake,

tremors splitting the ground beneath Your feet

suddenly adjacent to a jagged crag

so steep all light entering the gap’s depth

surrenders to bottomless ebony.

You see her on the other side

a silhouette of affectionate memories

shifting further away each moment.

You find Yourself howling across the chasm

only ceasing when vocal cords rupture,

air vacating from Your lungs. As distance dilates,

Your body bolts before perception grasps anything

blindly crossing limbo.

Her eyes agape, her mind erratic

too petrified to break her static state.

Slowly, her arms reciprocate Yours

ginger fingers cusping rhomboids

her face resting on Your sternum.

Moments slip to minutes,

yet neither party dares budge first

a silent psychological scrap

to manifest mute reverence.

You would sooner perish

than utter these errant thoughts aloud,

but an epiphany strikes You

with the force of an uppercut.

To her, You are legacy, potential, and toiled pith;

to You, she is genesis, steward, and sanctuary.

No volume of speech could ever meld

such unstable bluffs, but neither You

nor Your melancholy matron

would ever fathom

the most restorative tonic lies

in the unity of an ordinary caress.