Half a Week Adrift
Your day slips along the week, across the years
The only change in your stasis, variation for the tears.
The canvas woof has warped:
All happenings now, without your
Thoughts or voice, thread fresh
Detail, colour, texture to the tapestry
Evolve a patina slowly unfamiliar to
your timeless ambered constancy
We lose you more, lose more of you
Fixed still against life’s chaos
A reversed cinemagraphic* state
Relevance fades to shaded
Anachronism gilded with nostalgia,
Straining memory’s moorings;
Defining our difference
As the day slips across the week.
How often in our grief we call you to us, yes we would.
And yet, how seldom do we call to those we could.
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About This
Prompted by the realization that my sister's death, which happened 3 years ago on a Wednesday, is anniversaried this year on Sunday. So, a reflection of the slow erosion over time of the connectedness that roots in intimate knowledge of one another’s truths, experience, our living.
It is a truth about all deaths, all the separations, forgotten friendships, distressed relationships, displaced family;
All the living lost to time and distance and our failure to nurture.
Or heal.
The longer we remain disengaged, the more the past slips across the calendar, dies to us.
- A cinemagraph is a photographic image in which most of the picture is a still, but one highlight element is in motion. What I call here “A reverse cinemagraph” would have all in motion, except for the one highlight element, which would be static.