If My Grief Were A Loose Tooth

But it's you. It's me.
It's a bead of sweat in the valley
of a spine, the open fireplace,
smoke in the flue pipe.

It's rain on the bypass outside,
staining the concrete like death
on a bedsheet, still warm
and dark as beet juice.

When I was little, I got a loose tooth
that had to go. I didn't want to,
but I cut a bow from hazel,
tied a thread around that tooth

and shot the arrow. Snot, tears,
a bloody chin, cold air in the hole.
All that for a chip of porcelain
lost in the bushes --- but what about this?

A strand of your hair on the windowsill.
One of the greys you hated; spun silver,
moonlight through the eye of a needle.
I wish I could stitch your shadow

to my skin. When the day breaks,
I see it getting dressed on the wall,
pinning hair back, pulling tights up,
ripping a ladder in --- and the echo,

fluttering, small and dark in the curtains ---
I wake in the night with it tethered to my gut
like a hookworm. People say it takes time
to loosen it, but it's beautiful,

really --- the sadness, I mean.
A warm bud in the stomach,
scrubbed out of that rawness,
a red stone from the deepest root hole

at the centre of earth, a glowing coal ---
the kind of ache
you almost want to keep --- too good
to uproot, too good for a thread,

for whatever an arrow might bury
its head in. Let the bow sing, then;
Let the line hiss, let it whistle
over treetops with nothing on the end of it.

https://www.reddit.com/r/OCPoetry/comments/ym0h6j/a_decade_of_loss/iv3gdcx/

https://www.reddit.com/r/OCPoetry/comments/ym8p8u/upon_seeing_me/iv3ei9l/