It wasn’t at the funeral — I held it together, clean and pressed,
shook hands and thanked the neighbors, kept it where I keep the rest,
said the right words in the right order, kept my voice below the break,
walked to my car and drove home steady for the other people’s sake.
Four months later at a gas station off Route Nine,
playing on the radio a song we used to kill the time
with driving down the coast that summer, windows down, no destination,
and I was standing at the pump just coming apart at the foundation.
Grief is an ambush. It doesn’t fight you at the front.
It waits until you’ve lowered your defenses, dull and blunt —
finds you at the hardware store, finds you in a song,
finds you when you’ve been doing fine, when you’ve been fine so long,
finds you in the middle of a weekday afternoon.
It doesn’t knock, it doesn’t warn, doesn’t give you room.
I was at a barbecue, somebody laughed the laugh —
the pitch and the cadence of it, exactly cut in half
from something in a memory I thought I’d filed and sealed,
and I excused myself and stood behind the garage until I’d healed.
The grief that blindsides you is wilder than the grief you see arriving —
it comes without an invitation, leaves you barely surviving
the checkout line, the traffic stop, the song in the elevator,
and there’s nothing quite as lonesome as explaining yourself to a spectator.
I keep a mental list of places that have caught me unprepared:
the coffee shop on Madison, the stretch of highway where we dared
each other on a stupid bet, the bridge above the river’s bend,
the landmines of the ordinary I’m still navigating end to end.
People say it softens and I’ll take them at their word,
but softer isn’t finished — softer just means I’ve transferred
the full-body collision to a lower-grade collision still,
and I’m managing the distance between the blow and the spill.
And I’m not broken. I’m just occupied the way a body’s occupied
after something’s burned inside — still running, still with pride,
still capable of most the things I did before this came,
just occasionally seized without a warning and without a sound.