Ubiquity

Hi Carole, 

I didn’t post this to an NYT article,  a grief so deep it won’t die,  but am so overdue in writing, my thoughts here:

It has been 13 years since my sister died, she 52, I theoretically 18 months older but in reality we sloshed in the same womb blood, sharing.  There isn’t a day that goes by that my longing for her is greater than anyone understands. No one does, my extended bereavement isn’t normal a close friend says but who is she to judge? 

I had died the year before during a horrific surgery and perceived timelessness, the space that isn’t actually time because there is no beginning or end, rather a magnificence — a unison wisping into and out of, the void as we join the universe.  Void isn’t the correct descriptive either because within it there is movement and sound, an intangible flimsiness solid in its being. In scientifc terms, maybe the entanglement physicists refer to, and in that way we are tethered and shall always be.

Your poem: eloquent. 

Before Stars

Before there were stars night was an eyeless staring
with nowhere to look leading into, unmapped by any chart

and always losing itself. Because of this, women were born,
formed from the faces of candles, gasoline lanterns, or

kerosene lights, with nothing to see looking onto,
and which night knew nothing about from its distance.

Then came their flames rising like points from their
blind spots, forming stars, which night looking out of was seen

seeing women.

Carole Leslie Marcus