The Parting

What hurt me so terribly
all my life until this moment?

      –Jane Kenyon

Husband, I didn’t know the beautiful
broad-winged shape riding the air above us
as we lay in the hammock under the loblolly

pines was a buzzard until you told me.
Namer of whatever dark thing hovers,
you too deserve the truth, so when the police

find your father in a slick of blood
and offer no explanation but natural causes,
I say he drank himself to death, thinned

and thinned the skin of his esophagus
until it split. There’s a word in Japanese
we can’t translate though we take a sentence

to try: This is the parting. Singular goodbye
or something like an endless taking leave.
Years ago, you nightwalked the frozen river

between your house and mine, believing
breakage as likely as love. Still a boy, you’d
already reckoned with your slide into the airless

place beneath this place—but I didn’t know it.
Today, sad again to the point of rage, you say
I’m ready to go. The truth is, even I am getting

close. We’re stepping onto ghost glass together
or spooning under talons, some hungry beast.
Not always guests at the feast. The parting,

I might have said, sixteen, holding your electric
hand in movie-theater dark or marrying you under
leaf-cut sky or convulsing beneath your loving,

helpless gaze, our child wrecking through me
into life. Last night I shuddered above you, then—
This is the parting—lay laughing beside you

in our bed. I won’t say stay because you won’t
say you will. If I’m lucky, if I’m brave, we’ll keep
birthing an ending into ravening light.