the fingers type into tomorrow

The Fingers Type Into Tomorrow

Sometimes it just hits me upside the head so hard I am brought to my knees. The Death of James.
I don't know what to do when I'm blind-sided by grief that quick, that...without warning except that once my knees hit the rug, the hard wood floor, the garden walkway, the lane onside the house under a copse of Flowering May hanging down, drooping like tears, like a great gush of tears over the path until the damp earth is mud again even though it, the planet of this region, had almost stopped raining a week ago and the neighborhood had begun drying out, just enough to make weed pulling easy.

Once my knees hit the earth, it is nothing to allow the gravity of grief to pull my chest into the damp wet of the mud where I am held up only by the points of my elbows and then, my elbows slip and I am down, face into the clean mud where I cry and cry and cry. I can't help it. It is the way of grief, it is the way of loss and there is no map to guide me. I am hit by the grief, I fall, I am in the mud, I cry. It's that simple, it's that agonizing.

And there's the sorrow of my ex-husband, the father of my oldest son. It is a more subtle kind of remembering good little moments of living in the two room Depression cabin and all its rube-goldberg-put-togetherness. It was filthy when I moved in alone and I cleaned and scrubbed and painted and almost wished I could live alone that he wouldn't come up from Berkeley, that he would get lost, because the schizophrenic behavior was so difficult to live with until I discovered a plan of healing that worked until his brother the other schizophrenic came up with the oz of coke and destroyed all our hard work, all of John's newly acquired sanity, that even our doctor said was clear and pure as a bell. Him, I have intimate from the Other Side conversations with that are both frustrating and intimate in their shyness. You see, I have come to know more than him now. I am older than him now. I was a teen and then early twenties wife and then I had to take the baby and run and he remained still, always nine years older than I. But with his death, he stopped and I grew. I know it hasn't been long enough to acquire years of growth toward I am older than he is now, but there is a certain amount of he-has-stopped-on-the-planet and I keep moving on in my growth, aging and perhaps one day I shall be older, wiser than him. When we divorced, he was thirty-one and I was twenty-two and now I am fifty four, soon to be fifty five in late June and he will always be sixty. I wish I had gone over to his studio flat and brought a chicken, a book, a bouquet of flowers during those last almost twenty years. He couldn't couldn't hurt me psychically any more and I don't believe he would have hurt me physically any more. He was tired. He was ready, in many ways to leave the planet I am sure. His pain was beyond redemption, and yet, I read and I understand that with Y'shua, there is always redemption, if he had only known how. His father had poisoned his mind so greatly is why I believe there was the feeling of no redemption for him.

All this grief. I am so tired. Is this the Winter of my Discontent? Will joy come in the morning?
I have spent the last three days sleeping most of the day and most of the evenings, waking in the middle of the slow cold burn toward dawn where I ache with the chill as I sit at my old beautiful desk and write in my diary, or this electronic diary that it appears only one person reads and that grieves me. I had to let my space.com go, oh, it's still there, but it was so bound up with James, a damn fine friend and no lover, but not needed, our words and poems shared were far and away enough to make us lover of a kind. But it was that seeing his old posts and poems after he hit the carpet of heart attack or stroke, no one knew,  that made me have to come here to a foreign land Blogspot, so the pain of loss and separation would not burn the skin from my fingertips. Solace comes when I sit and talk about him to my now-husband, his genius, kindness, his awfulness, but one ought not expect one's husband to keep alive the memory of another man. And it appears only one person deciphers the scribblings of the scarab's feet across the sand that blow with the wind and disappear in this pathetic place called Diary of a Magpie Woman.

This studio was beautifully laid out , little boxes and drawers and tiny shelves in Chinese cabinets, floor to ceiling shelves with labels on the front and through the maelstrom of an artshow after James' death and the whirlwind of my desperate anger and grief, it is a terrible mess now and i don't have the strength nor the money to hire someone to help me re-organize it. It's these moments that fill me with madness. I am crazed by what if I died in my sleep, or like James, fell to the rug with the heart pain of the world. I made my will years ago based on an immaculate studio, which no longer exists. How could Dan find the little suchnsuch to give to sonso in this mess of all messes. And as I get ready for another art show first week in June , (or is it the second?), I plunder the mess and realize I am out of titanium white acrylic paint. When James first died, his daughter asked me what I would like to remember him by and I replied, a good paint brush and a tube of cadium red because that red is so expensive and I just can't afford it, little knowing I was out of white because of the mess. There is a part of me which would like to give away all art materials and stick only to poetry, but unfortunately, art makes more money than poetry and we are now even out of short grain brown rice.