The Truth Is

I liked to put my nose in your mouth and nudge your last fragments of teeth apart so that I could better get at the clues in there, from the broken edges all the way down to your liquored insides, the facts and the signs and the omens of you: smell of cider, rum, and brandy, ether on a handkerchief, the sticks you chewed when you were hungry, instead of eating, or bored, instead of living; smell of deep wet moss and brine from the sea and from your hobby of pickling yourself, smell of kosher dill half-sours and the cockles nicked from the shop, the smell of creaking barrels in ships’ holds, of bonfire and trash fire, smell of lit incense you swallowed and then released in wisps from your throat, smell of candy and nuts, and old rugs before a beating

Then there was something else I recognized, the certainty of your end, that every kiss foretold on the rich savor of your alcoholic breath: dark rot and drip, the flyblown suicide behind a deadbolt

After the First Death, There Is the Second Death

 

Dear Tom,

Webster’s dictionary defines death as…I kid, I kid.  Your death especially holds a lot of symbolic and historical meaning for people, because you really didn’t let many get close or stay close.  You were practiced at doling out fleeting intimacy, at random times, and to random people, and, as all dire alcoholics, prone to the occasional very noisy soapbox paean to the figures of your past (delivered in slurred voice and teary eyes to God) (those paeans drove me batshit.  They were repetitive and dull, not to mention clearly disingenuous, and, once in awhile, about old lovers).

You gave me your key and let me use it, tried as hard as you knew how to make me welcome in your very tiny, well-defended, private world.  I knew all your habits and little ways, all of the thousands of moments that made up a day in the years of our cobbled-together transatlantic partnership.  To me you weren’t symbolic or historical or an imago (well, maybe you were an imago, but isn’t every love relationship built on that?).  You were daily hours of the good and the boring and the enraging and the prosaic, and illuminated moments of transcendent joy, and infuriating fights, then chili on the stove, ice cubes clinking in brandy, discussions of art music poetry the multiverse and Death, but also thank you for buying my favorite bubble bath, and thank you for drawing the baths without number, and for washing my hair.  And then what the fuck your snuff has fallen all over these fresh white sheets, what will they think of us in this, the nicest of all hotels, also wash your socks I’m not the first woman to remind you.  Never mind all that.  You know what I mean.  You know that I saw you in the here and now, and I loved you.

Love,

Leah