Sestina for my friend

A widower knows another widower’s mind

Because both men have lost

Everything / matters and sometimes

Nothing / can be done to

‘Find some ease from paining’

But mind how you go because who knows

2

When the cancer comes / in this coupled world, God Knows

Everything / I want to say to you my friend and brother would burden your mind

Sorely, / longingly, yearningly, paining-

Never knowing why God thought she should be lost

World / with happy couples and grieving phantasms, shades and shadows of men with muted broken hearts too

Soon / breathing their last, left behind to make meaning sometimes

3

Your son is a fine man and I wonder if I might have sired a son sometimes

I doubt he senses your deep pain, / on this his wedding day I sometimes doubt he knows

All you feel /on this day when she should be here too

Much pride of love and pain of loss, / I think, besiege your deeply wounded mind

How you go / on is something they never tell us, not in the manual or if it was it is lost

Our way / and time weighs heavily on us this day as we are paining

4

The bride’s hope to be at her granddaughter’s wedding knifes you and you are paining

As you rise to speak, you say do not take things for granted—the unexpected occurs sometimes

No one senses our pain /—it is so today, and your sorrowful words are lost

World, / lost time, and you slump in the sadness that only your friend knows

The sting, the hurt, the injured heart and troubled mind

How you go, / I say, but you bid me rise and speak too

5

Arguing, I whisper what shall I say? You say I must speak too

Late for that / this hour, I whisper, it’s some five hours past and we are both paining

Sorely / you insist and standing, I compose my addled mind

How you go/—I stop—I look at the groom because I wonder sometimes

If he knows, why doesn’t it show? “If you would know why marriage matters, ask a widower, because he knows"

My words cut through the crowd like a scythe, and flatten the son, who now senses how much his father has lost

6

And gone she is and now he senses what is lost

Happiness? Have I wrongly broken his heart too?

Late / to soften the hard blow, for now he knows

The hurt / we feel, the unremitting paining

And he says the thought breaks his heart and I only wanted him to think of his father’s pain sometimes

I go too far / today, provoked by the thoughts of a muddled, mourning mind

Envoi

‘Though your bark shall not be lost’ the tempest will bring paining

Too little too late we always never sometimes

A widower knows another widower’s mind /