Grief Wears a Body

GRIEF WEARS a body,
and today she stands in mine.
The rose bush by my stoop, flush with blooms that flared
In seven long unearthly days of heat,
bends at daybreak toward the east,
Beneath a night of heavy rain. Nothing readies you
For when it wants to leave. You learn to grieve
 by grieving, and nothing must rush the work.

 
Rain will fell you earthward;
                                    be in no haste to rise. Grief lasts as long
As love was deep. Mourning is work that chooses you
Exactly when you want it least.  
I want to say it’s work that doesn’t pay,
But there’s a living you earn by putting in the time.
Grief pays for what it takes by all it gives.
Is grieving the living

  
The hardest grief to learn,
the most like death, itself?
You know my story now: three children I used to live with live
With me now in pictures
I’ve posted on my wall. And how I miss
Them only my body knows: my left hip is where
My daughter lives, and how it aches at dawn.
I bend, like the rose

In prayer that weighs me down,
and there she is in how I let her go.
My elder boy inhabits my right arm,
A bicep I work too hard at weights I lift
To give back to my body the waiting work
  my mind’s too fast do. And where
Is my middle boy? That lion lives in by toes,
numb with age and boots I wore

 
That never really fit.
                      This is the alchemy of sorrow, that rust
Upon the soul: to teach you how to dwell in what you’ve lost, and it
To dwell in you, making absence over into presence more profound.
Grief is a body that only knows how
 to heal by how it hurts. Until it doesn’t so much
Anymore. I tie the rose. My children prick
my finger there and laugh,
and all the weather clears.