She and Me

She and Me

6 may 2011

jp melville

She and me

Out at the cabin in Frontenac Township

Grey overcast skies, cold wind, no rain, but damp

We took to the day and hands held we came

Buying but a few things along the long way.

What were they you ask, those few things on the way?

Just the stuff that we need to be gone and be past

Time and the gossamer threads that tie us.

Like a fuel primer for gas generator

Like rope to hang between the trees for hand laundry and non-such

Like filters for the water primed deep from the well.

We started in sunshine

Our thoughts warm to the spring

On the highway we travelled

To smaller roads as we came

Closer, yet closer…

Then pause

We turned down a small gravel road

A sign

A graveyard

To visit this moment of spring

To find gravestones tell stories, children and young men who had died

Mothers dead and twins succumbed to their childbirth

One stone born it reads in Syria dead 1941

In Lanark of all places

All places.

We came chilly air to the cabin we sought

Where she embedded in sofa with blankets and newspapers she brought

And a book that she read all quiet to herself

I went on to repair the carburettor

Of the generator device

The well pump then ran true

Only to discover frozen burst copper pipes from deep winter freeze

Shut all systems down

Water only from buckets

Quiet all round

I saw that I too was silent

At that moment she then drowsed in the arms of her dreams

I made tea, steam curling, brought to her side

Her blue eyes opened and we talked about children and lives that we’d not had

Hers, mine, different parents and genes and cultural values aside

The kids would be different and never find ties that then bind

Her eyes pupils wide open not lust but cognition

That never ideals but just life no control just submission

The knot of our end in that moment then tied.

We separate, her eyes turn away

To find a place to restart

She rises, comes together

And says “Let’s pick fiddleheads...”

We move to the forest

Her hips sway

And she bends to pick baby ferns

She’s long gone from me then

So I raise my eyes to birds singing, leaf buds just anew

With crisp sunlight streaming through leafless forest branches sky

The voice of the wind's whispering gently begins.

So in departure I helped her with fiddleheads

And her hand I held while I wrote

These words

Such a good way to talk

Finger tips touching

She and me in the silence

Of another end

Begun anew.