The Five of Swords

CW: themes of severe depression, war/atrocity, death/decay

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My friend asks me what she can do to help.

Babe, do you need anything? – to be exact.

It’s a Wednesday evening,

the early darkness drawing over the skyline like a shroud and

I haven’t spoken a word to anyone all day, not a soul,

til this call, so the bony earth of my voice surprises us both for a moment.

I consider the question – what it means, why it’s asked;

her power and mine. I try to tally what we each have left. If anyone has anything,

when we walk a world like this one.

I think:

Drag me from beside the grave, beloved – I need help to swing my legs

out from where they dangle,

he is never coming back, none of my dead are, not ever.

I need you

to wrench my shoulders up and away

from the bloody ground, my face crushed madly against more news of war, the dead

pressing in – from home, from afar,

every day more unfathomable loss;

to find my empty eyes and pull.

I need you to help me wash my hair.

To tell me firmly that joining the dead is not for me, today;

that the way my feet tingle, their long hover just above the yawning cold,

is the lie.

I need you to hang up, immediately, and get in your car and drive to my apartment,

bring over the food that I can’t afford if I am also going to pay rent,

let me cry for as long as I need to into the shoulder of your favorite sweater.

All this is too much for any one person to ask another, and I know that,

so I say: oh – just coffee darling! Send me love send me luck. My voice light and unrecognizable,

a pretender in a glittery hat.

She tells me I’m so positive. So brave. When we hang up, I realize

I’ve failed again to say no, no, it’s rot, I am decaying, I am grieving even for those still breathing.

For whatever reason we are still pretending that I am part of the world, but

nothing makes any sense – no work, no love,

not even this despair –

and so I am crouched in my own grave, not dead and not alive.

I want at last to be seen

not as a list of terrible things that I have improbably survived,

not as the worst of my sins,

but as these and more, more,

a galaxy, a grave undone,

a hard rain that ends somehow in searing faith.

I want you to call me when you need help. More than this,

I want to come when you call. Mostly,

I want you and I to look with steady eyes on the worst things

and not falter, but to feel everything;

to move toward the nightmares,

to be permanently ensnared by the desire to do good

even as we walk the quaking world.

I do not call her back. I can’t tell

if the shame I feel is about the wanting itself

or if perhaps it is more about

the immortal grip I keep on this grief,

how it howls under

the horrible miles of earth bearing down upon it.