The piece that I’ve been working on this week feels incomplete, so here is a poem I began writing over a month ago while in a deep pit of sorrow and grief. It’s a simple one I think, one about the loss of the dreams that we have to let go of when a relationship ends. Every relationship has their own that makes them special. Ours were small and beautiful. They were full of hand-grown tomatoes and homemade ciabatta. Fuck.
Oatmeal
I’m eating my last bowl of oatmeal,
looking outside the window
of a life that was meant for us.
It’s perfectly framed:
You in the sunlit kitchen
singing dad rock making ciabatta,
swaying your small hips to rhythms
still foreign to me
and I endlessly pondering
how to fit
all of it
onto evenly spaced lines.
Love was delicious to you.
The tomatoes you grew
welcomed eating and everything
else that needed to be tasted.
I was there to catch them
with my clumsy hands when
they at last fell, bringing you down
with me to kiss the generous earth.
Now I’m waiting and twisting
my cold spoon in circles
until one day I hunger
for something more than oats.