Past the Point of Anger
I used to have a genuine fire about the things you went and did,
I used to have the real and present heat of a man who still
cares enough to sustain the anger, cares enough to feel
the actual temperature of it, the burn, the thrill
of a fury with real oxygen still inside it, with live fuel
to keep it moving,
with the active current of wanting you to know.
I used to have the fire and the fire was informative about me,
it told me I was still fully inside the thing,
and the telling would show
me that the thing still mattered at the cellular
and chemical level,
that the wound was living and warm and generating real heat.
I used to have the fire and the fire was a reliable signal
that the signal was still transmitting clearly,
I could feel the beat
of its frequency in my chest in triggering moments,
when your name arrived,
when someone mentioned casually what you’d done.
I used to have the fire
and it meant something was still connected,
and then one unremarkable day something disconnected,
and the fire was done.
I’m past the point of anger now and past the point of caring,
I’m past the point where your name produces a single thing in me at all.
I’m past the point of the fire
and the long cold that followed after the fire,
and I’m in the open country on the other side of everything,
and the fall
is done, you’re done,
the account I was keeping is closed behind me.
I’m past the point of anger and well past the point of the cold,
I’m in the country that exists after all of those things run out together,
and the country that exists after all of it is the longest kind of old.
The cold came in after the fire
and the cold was itself a something,
it had a texture and a quality of weight and press.
The cold communicated that you still mattered enough to be the exact thing
I was keeping the cold about,
the cold was not nothing, it was the address
you still had on my interior,
still a coordinate, still the subject
of what I was carrying and how it occupied the freight
I move through the world with,
still actively investing in the maintenance.
The cold was after the fire
and the cold was information arriving late.
And then one unremarkable morning it was quiet,
in a way I had genuinely not encountered before in that place inside.
A quiet that had no underneath it,
no second layer, no managed surface,
a quiet that was actually quiet without anything alive to hide.
This was the actual and authentic quiet of a man who has finished
with the complete construction,
who has finally set the whole building down,
who has nothing remaining in him that moves in your direction anymore,
not the fire, not the cold,
not the residue, not the background sound.
I should tell you directly that this is not the triumphant
and redemptive ending
that you might have constructed
and hoped for in your accounting of me.
This is not the place
where I announce that I have fully forgiven you,
this is not the resolution
where anything circles back to clarity,
back to something better than where we were
–this is only the nothing
that arrives when a fire has completely consumed every unit of its fuel.
And I’m standing in the nothing and I’m telling you about it
because the telling of it is the last available thing,
and the last thing is cool.
Like the ash is.
The ash is cool and the ash is accurate.
The ash is the complete and final record of what burned.
The ash has no remaining heat in it, no residual temperature,
no capacity to warm the hand, no final lesson to be learned
from holding it–it is only what it is, which is the nothing
that was once a something and is now the after-something,
and it holds
its shape briefly the way ash holds a shape before the wind comes,
and then the wind comes and the shape gives up and the cold
is just the cold and nothing in it is about you anymore.
Nothing in the air moving through the place the fire was
is carrying your name or your address or your column
in the ledger,
and the ledger is also ash and the ash is also because
of what was, the open air, the absence where the thing had been,
the space where something occupied the space
and doesn’t occupy it now.
And I am in the space and it is quiet and nothing in the quiet
is pointing in your direction–and the quiet is showing me how.