My Daughter’s Silence & Third Year of the Divorce, poems published by Lynne Knight

Then grief came like the dog it was.

Chewing everything, grabbing it and shaking,
sinking its old teeth in. Old but durable,
capable of such maceration it was hard to recognize
the room for what it was. Books torn
open, the rug stained, table legs gnawed.

Outside, the first rain, cold, hard, like vengeance
pent up so long it can’t seem to finish.

Grief went out into the rain, howling.
When it came back in, coat slathered, stinking, it lay
by the window and began to dream.

How else would it find a way out?

Grief dreamed, dreamed, in the ruined room.
When it woke to the wreckage, it lay back and dreamed more.

In this way, over days, weeks, years, grief’s howl
thinned to a whine, then to wind,
then nothing,

as if it were an actual dog, and a bone had been flung
for it to chase, a bone with little
left of the original sorrow but meat and gristle
clinging as they were meant to do.

Third Year of the Divorce

Arduous efforts in the botanical garden.
Sweat, shovels, tractors.

Leafing, flowering.

Scattering. Agency of animal,
of wind.

The on-going struggle toward continuity:
the self constructs its narrative
out of disparate elements:
so many days I have no memory of.

Scattered: agency of animal,
of wind.

Of what we call the mystery, thinking
grace comes, it comes,
it must come:

there are winged things so high up
we never see.