She Sat Among the Violets

So words are dead, a prison where ghosts should be painless, but we persist in painting imperfect pictures for the sake of our own souls because we cannot find a closer connection to heaven.

Is Tuesday of voilets or violence? In beautiful irony, like a bird misjudging the air and crashing to earth by the force of a gravity that lets us hold on, the difference matters but is slight. Tuesday cannot hold violets without the violence.

Do you understand?

In sex, making love, we lose something personal, an unnamable part that we hadn't looked for before, and the hurt is mixed like paint with the joy of discovering a secret gift, a personal power. The fright, the loss, the discovery are inherently braided together, and words attempt to make sense of the knotted mess of yarn we have left lying on the wooden floor of the hall.

How close do we allow words to come? Behind one word are a thousand others. "Sad" means everything and nothing, and the inevitable question still stands: How do I find the words to say...

I wrote a poem, "You Were Little Sister, Diverging." It isn't a secret: I can't understand how our blood and cells and genes can be the closest possible between two people, yet she is incomprehensible to me. Let her be different. But there is so much she refuses to see.

Are there any words in any language to say what I need to say? Poetry theory claims that we find our closest meaning through analogy. Because humans share a common knowledge, we can understand the meaning behind, "All the world's a stage/And all the men and women merely players" (Shakespeare As You Like It). Ironic, no? To say something, we say something else because our words are not adequate in their meaning.

So I wrote a poem to imprison the best of my thoughts. Do I print it? Do I give it tangibility for her to see? No, she wouldn't see it. I'm afraid words have arrived too late, too inadequate to save a relationship that has been diverging for 17 years.

I want to tell her ghosts are not painless, there are no violets without the violence but also that it doesn't have to be as bad as she makes it. How bright does she intend to make the blood on snow? When will she find her closest connection to heaven?

She is little sister, diverging. Can I hope she is not already diverged?

My question for you: How close do we let our poems come to personal Tuesdays, and is there enough common knowledge, common emotion, left in this world for us to understand one another?

Basalil