You, Emblazoned

for Kelly Caldwell (1988–2020)

Yet your voice was here—

                         just there-here in our house, shining eyes
who dazzled twice, already timed,

a pulsing wind below the glass in spring,
and coaxed, intelligent, stoic, touching everything, you stirred
me to life, in spite of illness and damage

to the country, field laid waste, election blaze, illness
wasting a brain, a mind. Mars, and ocean, canceled.
Cream and streamers, canceled, 

                                                  censored. 
“I am,” you said, 
                         though your skin flickered

to hackberry bark, or as bullet 
pierced pineal gland, blinking out
your day-night clock. Your syllables

endure frail days, which blow
through equinox, dissipate, time out—

            you imagined the planet
            with you already gone:

a sad expression, no real loss, the earth still a wild salon,

yet the name you chose
is etched into air, a violent wind
parts my chest, tenderviolet, electric

nights in our sheets, no longer 
countable, unrecounted. You, here, again,
my is-are-were, have-been-is, in my 

arms, bed is-was our house-eyes, in my 
only thought only root only gone,
my big only gone still here voice
blazing, I mourn you-her, 

her-you, who were born-dreamed into the world’s thicket
yet reinvented through an inner radiance, 
the radiance of a name, 
the name that is yours,
the radiance that is-was yours 
                                    that is-was you—

Credit

Copyright © 2023 by Cass Donish. Originally published in Poem-a-Day on October 10, 2023, by the Academy of American Poets. 

About this Poem

“This poem emerged out of the disorientation of grief. I was processing the ways in which grief dislodges us from normative spacetime. The past, present, and future churn; memory becomes a presence that pierces the present and flows in all directions at once. This poem’s language is confounded by the temporality of grammatical tenses and perplexed by pronouns—second-person versus third-person. When a loved one dies, it’s agonizing to hear others refer to them in the past tense, beginning just hours after they are gone: ‘she was.’ This is how I felt when Kelly died. The heart’s desire is to say: ‘you are.’”
—Cass Donish