Day 15 - Silt

There is a downward pull that begins slowly –
Forty years of fine red silt cease flowing through your veins
And settle like sedimentary rock.
Things, and you, begin to taste of copper.

Lavender mists condense as you walk out to fetch the paper
The kettle is whistling or the coffee roiling when you return to the kitchen.
Your lover is waiting, his beard and hair greying slightly:
Sometimes he still kisses you like he did when you were twenty three.

You start to spend your evenings in the ochre light
Of sloppily-painted sunsets which begin around the time the theme for Final Jeopardy fades out.
Coffee cups are washed, sinks drained.
Everything smells of earth and book pages with a hint of Pine-Sol.

The window is filled with the amber radiance of marigolds –he likes to garden,
While you are more careless, killing houseplants by neglect.
You promise to stop disassociating yourself, and to write less in the second person.
You get drunk less often and even jog once in a while.

Your veins still feel like a damned hourglass of hemoglobin and slurry
But eco-friendly cleaning products and green diets are not your style.
You opt to make mortality look glamorous
With half-smoked cigarettes and a notebook full of stories.

The night comes with sharp brittle frosts and blue fog.
Things happen too quickly, too slowly.
Your heart is not what betrays you, nor your lungs
For once your blood alcohol content is even below the legal limit.

It’s unfair, you protest as you hydroplane (a lovely word)
and everything condenses to a sudden flash of white:
Hiking trips, Christmas trees,
The night you spent together two weeks before your wedding.

I wish I could remember the last thing I said to you
Or could rest knowing it was something that mattered -

(The silt settles, leaving everything black and still.)

I would say that I would go on loving you, even after death.