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February 17, 2023
In Memory of my Beloved Husband, Floyd Russell Taylor
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As the day dawned, my husband lay in twilight,
A room with a curtain drawn against both dawn,
And the intrusion of a dark matter dawning, the ides of his death.
Was he dying in this fade, or being born into a bright
The beloved departed ones lit for him, apart from me.
He was opening his eyes intermittently.
They filled with an astonished wonder.
He stared straight passed me, passed the earth, to engage telepathically
With ancient spirits far greater than myself,
His husband growing ever so slowly old
And diminished in the ticking seconds of the clock.
Still, with regards to each other, after forty two years
We had both evolved into empaths.
This was a gift from God for keeping faith.
The holy denizens of the heavens had no power to break the psychic sinews
Woven into a tether between two married men.
This reality is only inferred, divined,
As if by a divining rod in the gnarled hand of an aging prospector.
But it is ever so immutably true.
Involuntarily, inexorably, as if my wishes and prayers were irrelevant,
I felt his transformation by minute, minuscule degrees.
By the minute, he became less embodied body
And more of the cloud that is soul.
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Rocking a chair, I too opened my eyes intermittently,
Seeing preternaturally beyond this curtained dimness
And into the oblivious and chaotic earth of the ruined,
So obviously born under the runes of misfortune.
I kept one eye on this human hell,
The other on my husband, who was leaving me for the heavens.
Would he be welcomed as a child of God? Yes, he was deserving.
He was about to be divinely kissed,
With a kiss that stings away the stink of human flesh.
Through prayer, I willed that his spirit be clothed in a raiment of light
A cloth of silver and bejeweled gold could only emulate.
As dawn clarified itself into morning light,
As afternoon yawned into evening,
He lay with labored breathing, unable to raise his eyelids
To show me the grace note of his soul.
I felt it instead, like a song that is suddenly inspired by the notes of a Genius.
I touched him back, “Remember Me.”
Our bond had never seemed so strong. I knew he lay in a state of radiant rapture.
Parting is…the All of Heaven. There is no place for Hell, a misplaced fear.
He had arrived. But he wouldn’t leave my side.
I felt the shudder of a sundering as I released our bond and gave it back to God.
He was free of me. I remained behind, my faithless self before he named me his.
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All who are born on this day of the 17th, in the month of February,
Let us not judge each other only by what our eyes can see,
Failing to be a prospector, divining the gold of what we aspire to be.
Let us not cross paths just to suffer the very sight of each other at the end, or the slight.
Instead, between the bouts of our fencing, as if we were enacting a tourney,
Before the rapier’s kiss to our cheek, the mark of a master who would scar,
Let us raise our masks as a salute to the mysterious ends
Of the fanciful footwork, the dancing which inexplicably draws us together.
Who is the Genius singing this music?
Rather than rapiers, we should pick up batons, those magical divining wands
That have a power to convey the measures of some ancient’s song
Whose truths will set us free.
We may be free, but alone, lonely.
My imperative is to remember I have inherited the aura of my better half. Remember!
He was a man who held me tight, always,
As if we were a tale worthy of the telling, from “One Thousand and One Arabian Nights.”
So, if ever you should smile at me, and temptingly call me by your name,
Even if that name be Courage,
Know that I will look at the shadow cast behind me,
And remember who I was, who I remain,
And speak the name, his name, the name which makes me…
Real.
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Steven Golden
Written in Green Valley, Arizona
2nd Iteration Written January 21-22, 2023
Completed at 10:40 AM, January 22nd
stevengoldenpoetry 