convalescence
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There is one species of woundedness
I’d rather not be lifted from — think hands cupped like a chalice just to hold the sting and shimmer of seawater, then the hands slowly disappearing until the water falls back into the sea — because the pain, or what initially felt like pain but turned out to be just shadows that grief could cast, was unbearable, or simply because it was mine and therefore harder to cast aside. Enough of this suffering, you buried her with your own hands, remember how you tried to counsel me, being the wiser of us two, as if words alone should suffice to put an end to all that unravelling. Rescued or ruined, shattered or intact. It hardly matters to anyone else now. Like what blurred by my window this morning that I’d failed to save from the looming thunderstorm (was it an oriole or saffron finch?) — what sought refuge from endless wandering though I turned it away — I still mourn, stroking the underwings of a memory in whose fine details of feathering I keep getting lost. Then the skies clear, the fog finally lifting like the veils off of the faces hidden behind history. All that light, folding and unfolding, like ceremonial robes. |
William Henry Fox Talbot. [Wild Fennel], 1841-42. The Metropolitan Museum of Art.
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Gavin Yuan Gao is a genderqueer immigrant poet of Chinese descent. They hold a BA in English and Creative Writing from The University of Michigan and are a student in Cornell University’s MFA program. Their work has appeared in New England Review, The Cincinnati Review, The Journal, Waxwing, Poet Lore, Glass: A Journal of Poetry, and elsewhere.