The Refugee and the Reaper
Richard Holleman
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All Quiet in the Chrysalis It is quiet in this chrysalis. I have grown the requisite Covid-19 bristly beard that will scratch the blue paper masks sewn by a woman with hair long enough to win souls for a good cause. It is languid in this chrysalis. If God has given me words I do not know which taste and smell of peaches in rum in a sauce over a high flame. I am learning to cook my verbs at the proper social distance. This is the time of doctors, nurses, medical professionals. Of starched gloves rubbing raw hands, pink with danger. Of hospitals belly full of patients and lungs empty of supplies. Still I whisper an email of peace to her who holds a handful of dust.
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The Refugee and the Reaper Behind me is the destroyed town, toxic, black smoke still rising, struts bent like tarred fingers grasping upwards for salvation. I am in golden fields, ripe with wheat in the harvest season. The aroma of fresh timber stands by. This place of plenty tempts me to rebuild. If I had a locket of you, I would grasp it now. I would resist the temptation to plan, to pour new foundation, to work the wood, knowing it was I who destroyed that town. I am both refugee and reaper. Mercy and Grace are hand-holding twins skipping around the harvest, stirring chaff from wheat, singing their school songs. Eyes red from the chaff, I pause in the fields.
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The Almost Happily Ever After The woman who created fire from the kindling of kindness I remember her, I forgive her bloodlust. Forgiveness may be red, but the price has been paid. The snow today cools our passions, the sparkling white talks over the dirt with a pure voice, loud as angels. For a moment there is silence, and as we take it all in there is healing, icy as balm. Then the snow melts into gray slush. The covering gone, the dirt speaks: return to your grimy regrets. Our mouths wiped clean, we return to our vomit, we hope for next snowfall.
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Conjugal Visits My demons are quiet these days. I would use a gravestone to mark their spot in the cemetery of my heart, but gravestones are for made for us not the dead things we carry no matter how tight the embrace. If my heart is truly a cemetery then let there be daffodils and lilies, cones of red roses, darks chocolates, and strawberry ice cream dripping into the mowed grass, green as innocence. Let it be a sunny day with only a cloud or two. If she, my beloved, must have a grave then let me be the one to dig deep for both of us, not that I am in a hurry, but to remember always, marking my days: her grave is full, and mine is waiting.
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In Memory of Giants I feel small like a faith where coffee can fix a day or a meme can rub away the smudges of depression. I am too tiny to fit inside big things like suicide without being swallowed without so much as a splash. I will not romanticize the subject it’s a cruel mess I do not doubt and the past is fat with yellow teeth if truth be told. If you leave now, you will miss the good part.
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Love Letter to Myself We played the timbrels and pipes, but you did not dance. We sent you party invitations, but you did not come. When waters rose, boats arrived, but you would not sail. When you drowned, you lamented you did not have a friend in the world.
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Parlor Tricks Can you be still? Can you be quiet? You squirm as though not in your own skin. Try self-medicating. Yes, your skin will no longer be your own, but the squirming will stop giving way to the shakes. “Why can’t you just focus on God?” A well-meaning relative once asked unaware of my early morning devotions. Silent, I believed in kindness over being right. In truth, I am neither kind nor right. In my left hand is the past In my right is the blue pill: I want to wake believing whatever I want.
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Pressing You press forward to grab hold of the prize. I press a wall of victims of my best intentions. I used to believe I could save you with a hug or that you could save me with a caress. I used to think I was important enough for you to hate with all your heart, mind, and soul and I was hard as a statue and could endure it. Blood and sand give pain and time, which give wisdom to the one who marks his or her past with scars, whose right arm is a constellation of italic names. I now press forward to grab hold of the prize. Yet I never forget the wind pushing me forward is the gale of past transgressions forgiven.
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Tabula Rasa I stop crunching through the snow. The night air tastes like pine needles. The night snaps cold through me, but no longer flesh and blood, I have become naked light, numb. I am the absence of music and time. In this moment all religions converge, lost in a tabula rasa, clean of transgressions, to a single sensation, a single truth: Love Agape Love Flesh and blood return with burning cold. The moment is crushed by memories of her and a future without her. Door chimes ring of purpose and destination in the distance. And a person with those has no right to die even on a snowy night in one’s backyard.
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The Scouring Blankness is neither the disease nor the cure; it is the condition of the day, the weather. Today it poured blankness like bleach over the land, the wet grass and palm fronds fading to white from here to the horizon. Not just the absence of color but of sound, scent, and taste. My tongue is dry, mute from the last meal of tap water and butterless bread. My eyes grow hungry from the lack of blue eyes to behold, from the lack of softly haired forearms to caress. I have no hand to hold on my walk through the barren parking lots along the boarded-up plaza. The streets are finally safe, but scarily so. There is nothing left to fear, there is nothing left to love. I lack personality, I merely observe and process: every end deserves a pause before its next beginning.
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The Healing Rock Keep your chakra charts, your pretty stones, your daedel mystics and shaman. All I need to heal is the venom between my teeth and the gritty loam under my nails as I starve myself on her grave, cursing her for every lily-soft kindness she let fall on me like petals on a pig, hating her for every betrayal she whispered to my trusted friends. When my tantrum ends and I release the smudged teddy bear on her rock, I see the clouds have not parted and the rain taps all the markers. There are no songbirds to sooth me yet I am soothed. There is no one to lift me yet I stand and walk to a warm home to prepare my first hot meal.
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The Strange Bouquet For Cristina Scabbia, I’m sorry there are no persimmons, no roses, no dark chocolates to soften your palate. My gratitude comes in a bouquet of skulls. Why such a quiet offering for my love? Each skull is for a sin your song pardoned. They are scented with sweet myrrh so that each piece of my past may receive its proper burial, dirt clumped at your boots. You are adorned in leather and black metal. Neither priestess nor princess, you are so much more than the songbird who bled with me on those thorny nights. You gave me a new identity: no longer the man who mourns, I became the man who loves.
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A Soldier’s Husband My love is on the front lines I know what it is to fear the word “widower” I want to smell peaches again in this one-bedroom apartment as she fills it with her dancing Her name is tattooed over the scars on my wrists screaming her absence
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Before the Equations Graphs of blue, red, and green lines make concrete the abstract numbers once concrete as people, solid as life, which fades with a loved one’s cough. Lines, marking the distance between dying, crawl the x axis. The y axis is the death toll minus those living in isolation divided by the wait in fear, the fear of becoming a segment of a line on the president’s graph, the fear of becoming abstract as yesterday’s news, though yesterday burns in the spirit, the same spirit yearning for the daily grind of yesterday, which had its own problems but flourished with all its beautiful perfections and imperfections like vendor carts steaming with foot-long hot dogs and children with bags of over-buttered popcorn and the red velvet flowers in cracks of concrete under people and more people, all the beautiful people.
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Let the Music Play Smooth enough to skate on, her voice is not enough to save the audience from the prickly virus poking its way through touch and dance. Joy is communal too, casting out caution in the house of mirth and youth. The last call for drinks echoes the halls before the world changes forever and fills with unfulfilled dreams. Dry, old men will shake their heads, but this old man has tears to spare for yesterday’s youth, today’s names, because this wizened gentleman still hears that first song under an umbrella with his first love licking frozen red raspberry yogurt on the beach.
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Dark Breath Breathless as driftwood I Her Gone Forever though many, the ocean has its days though few, we had ours grief has no such expiration our ghosts haunt these waves magnificent, vengeful crushing to bedlam any who interrupt our blue forever
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Growing, Growing, Growing Only a handful of red pills in this dark place. Black branches spread up your chest and throat. The scent of melting wax empties your mind. All paths to happiness close only growth is toxic. There is no promise your flesh makes you believe in. Canopied trees are for children, criminals, and martyrs. As breath is for candles, you swallow darkness and its lie of something better.
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Orientation Day What are you in for?... of course, you’re innocent How long?... yeah, it goes by quicker than you would think. For amber waves of fire… Darkness above all... You’re new here… I can tell You need someone to show you the ropes hold your hand give you the first one free If you’re going to be a permanent resident, you could use a friend like me.
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Acknowledgements Thank you to my dear friends Cindy, Melissa, and Sarah for encouraging me to write poetry, for showing me there is a life full of vibrance and color worth living after even the greatest loss. Much love.
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