Poetry: Descanso

Descanso

Each day another piece of me falls away —

falls into the long grass

like a coin dropping into black water

and the days of my life vanish.

The air accepts me without ceremony.

Traffic moves through me as wind—

through a house without walls left.

These small tallies, so many —

that I have stopped counting them.

I am dying in ways unseen.

Each love opened a door

and walked out wearing something of mine.

I did not ask for it back,

and didn’t know until the cold came in.

Each morning the sun becomes an obligation.

The ache tilts north, then nowhere —

and I perform the necessary motions

of a garden performing a rite of spring

long after the gardener has gone.

What remains are grains —

not sand but something more minute,

the last gold dust of an hourglass

no one cared to reverse.

How to carry the weight of accumulated seconds?

All those moments stacked like ruins —

I would give them to someone

who still believes in time’s architecture.

But I have become transparent to desire.

One dim hour folds into another dim hour.

One disappointment closes its eyes

as its child opens its own.

One face practicing its lying

rehearses in the mouth of the next.

And I —

a moving effigy for the unresolved,

a still pool for the ones

whose inner compass had no shore —

I held what they could not.

I paid for the quiet they mistook as mine to give.

What is left

lives in a few last grains

suspended above the dark I am.

How does one wake each morning continuing

while the body rehearses its ending?

Because I have learned

the particular mercy of the almost-finished —

the last note

that doesn’t resolve,

the garden at November,

the light

finally learning

how to go out.

Marni Fraser

0430.2026

me | sweden | 2008