Grief is a wave function unquenched by time
or platitudes: a better place, memories as comfort—
absence barely eased by inscrutable afterlife signs.
The soul the body left behind indomitable, and yet…
this dewdrop world is diminished and changed.
If immortality is only remembrance of life’s gift
by survivors, I want to shout your name, arrange
to carve it on stones or stuff it in bottles set adrift.
I have earned these scars, body and psyche’s
grief maps. Were I a tree, they would be evident—
wound wood. Poems, art, all manner of surcease,
forestall little: expected or not the waves wreck
those puny moats. Another surge sure to appear
because everything of beauty holds a tear.
Permournation (neologism): a transitory calm, with full knowledge the next wave of intense grief is inevitable but unpredictable. from perennial + mourning with a nod toward perturbation
Italicized words in final line are a quote from a friend’s father (personal communication)