Before seeing through the mirror, one must realize it is there. Years can be spent in fear of it, or egotistically refusing to accept it.

The forever-severed link:
What buried unfindable part in us
Makes such choosing no less implements it
Calculates the incomputable proof?
None who knew you groped that aspect.
The noose in the cellar,
the research in the bedroom,
the certitude in private agony,
the uncrossable wasteland towards hope.

Friends who walked far to console the night
I was one of a small select grouping
A family stunned numb in their leafy estate
I met the sister a year prior while a grocery clerk
Enchanted wordless in mad desire by her tangled dark hair
the way teenagers will stumble now and then
but now, a sister stone quiet on a family sofa
in a suburbia bewildered by the American delusion.
I comforted best I could
with my feeble compassion
the only time that we hugged,
and I felt chaste.

Well nigh a lifetime later,
she checked in on me, via technology
confessing she missed her every sunrise
and told me what mystery I never till then knew
frankly, the way one speaks sober about history,
that my best friend had asked her betrothal, formally
presenting himself and his prospects, as if 1750.
They both played piano with devotion with grace
And that was more than sufficient for Joseph.
But the parents, cold with reason, kaboshed any union
Sure that finishing her education would be best
And my friend who shared everything swallowed this silent
What must he, I thought, felt of her fall

Perhaps we suspect a false cause
So turbulent those times, in an indirect interior way
Any number of building conflicts might tighten the ropes
A stern father with one outlook,
business warrior in cutthroat Manhattan.
Idiosyncratic daughter,
not averse to holding head high in the clouds.
With years and wisdom we see it,
How demise was inches away so many times,
When not for us, then secretly, for fate-bound companions.

You were a giver, Marjorie
And that will count.
Somehow.

_______RS

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