brackish waters

     That place where you feel grief dropping off.  It’s kind of weird, you know, because it’s like letting go.  You don’t want to.  You can feel guilty. You wonder, is it lack of love or loyalty?  Or you wonder, will you forget the connection, the feeling of that person in your life?  You go through this different kind of sad.  It’s different. I just think how, having gone past that, it’s like that place where the fresh water in the river meets the ocean.  My ocean, ma g’ocean.  The ocean, the mother of us all.  My brother’s ashes thrown into the curl of a wave.  We picked just the right one, me and his partner. Soft, but a rider. 

I used to say, in my pride, that I loved the ocean more than my mother.  Now that my mother is gone, I can tell you, it was never true. It’s a different kind of love. I didn’t know there were so many kinds of love and I put everything into a hierarchy that doesn’t mean anything to me anymore.

the wild blue poem series, from the first section on grief. the entire book is available through Amazon Kindle at:  https://www.amazon.com/dp/B00E2UU19O