Sam Matteson

Connie Nichols, a stranger to me, but the beloved sister of my dear friend Alan Wimberley, died suddenly and tragically in a motorcycle accident on Good Friday last.  A news story reporting her life and death recounted the details (see links).  And as is so often the case, news of death takes me back to the loss I have felt as each one of my parents and parents-by-marriage departed.

I offer these lines of verse as a validation of the pain we all will know if we live long enough.

(Descansos  means “resting place” and refers to the informal memorials that appear on the margins of the highway where a loved one died. This poem was composed in February 2003, following the death of my friend and father-in-Law John Rhodes.)

Descansos

I scraped the graveyard’s mud from our shoes
With my car’s ignition key
And I remembered the overburdened “x”—coming back,
Stabbed into the earth beneath the trees:

A flower-capsized cross
That barely stood on its own
In the highway’s broad shoulder.

There last someone lay upon the earth,
And last breathed this good air,
And last blinked back sunlight.

My heart is not large enough
To hold the hurt for every man and woman,
But I cannot escape the pain of you
That spills out when I turn to look.

Would that every end-point were punctuated so,
With full stop, or semi-colon, or comma—plain.
Seems to me a life deserves that much—or more.

But no; in memory only can we truly see
The frayed end of your line that threaded
Through the eyelets of our days and nights
That I would cinch it up if I could.

But I look back in my mirror
And watch the grieving miles
Unreel with each revolution,
And loss—elastic—ever stretches, there to here.

 In Oklahoma we crossed high over the river
Where the barge collapsed the bridge
And ten cars drowned with a nightmare fall.

Now no crosses or flowers float on the stream.
New concrete spans the gap, too.
I see no phantom mists or apparitions,
And the place is haunted only in dreams.

In truth, here is not a horrid but a holy place,
Where last you breathed—and then you did not.

So my heart piles stones high
To cairn this sacred spot,
This place where you left off
And where we recall you still.

I know that this is not enough,
But it is all I have strength to do.
Pray it is enough.
It must be.