Untitled [Elegy For the Memory of a Relationship]
It isn’t the space
the closeness of knowing
somebody so well
we hear their heartbeat
inside ours,
or the aperture of life
squinting one morning at a time,
but I freeze right there,
hold & blow on the image
wait for the smell
of the park & cut grass
to come again.
This picture fades
& here we find perpetuity.
Where they used to be
you dig a cave
out of resilience
until eternity
like rain
pours the memory back
& then you’re drowned in it.
The heart has learned
to swell & deflate
in a particular order
& I look at its churning for rhythm.
A centeredness
in my chest pins
me to this moment in forever.
Love as an act
of un-resilience
& the prow of life bobbing
just above our sunken resolution.
You asked me to
wet myself with blood;
I thought your hands
were a metaphor.
“All That’s Not for the Sake of Living, It is Living.
Life is a Sincerity.”
after Emmanuel Levinas
Understand solitude
not as a state but a continuity
of waking. Right here build a nest
out of broken pages, watch the world shuffle
& drink another cup
of coffee just to feel
how heat runs fluid in the deepest
part of the morning.
These hollow pages we meditate into
& like night we seek the absence
itself, see it as comfort. I take and hold it
conversely. What is living:
sincerity reserved only
for myself & whatever birds
who’ve found water or sand
to bath & love in.
Nicodemus Nicoludis is a poet, adjunct community college professor and bookseller. He is the author of the chapbook Natural History (rot house books, 2018) and his work appears in Potluck Mag, Maudlin House, Chronogram, Reality Hands and elsewhere. He lives in Queens, NY. Twitter
photo credit: stephanie roberts Twitter Instagram SoundCloud
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