The Fountain

It’s ok,
we’re almost there.

The day you came home with the news
a tree began to grow in our living room.
You told me your body could no longer take it,
that we’d better hold fast to the days we still had left.
Like the Mayfly,
you believed we only ever get one sunset.
I told you
that life, like anything else, can be trapped, chained, tamed.

For weeks before the walls of our bedroom
absorbed screams and rained plaster.
It was a sound these walls,
so familiar with the cries of love-making,
had never heard before.
On those nights, a silhouetted stranger
crowded your side of the bed.

By dinner time the tree was already four feet tall.
It’s bark a rusty color red, it’s branches heavy with buds.
So that night we moved our bed in under it.
We gazed up through its branches,
two wild creatures that
watched the spry leaves push free of their cocoons,
unfurl their wings, and dry on gusts of our flesh and sweat breath.
That night I swore I would not let you pass from this life so easily.
I would not rest till I solved this.
I would lead you to the fountain
and together we would drink from her lip.

Death is a disease like any other! There is a cure!

I followed every path till its end,
turned every coin,
opened every chest.
They were all empty.

I even sacrificed myself to the auric gate
shut tight with impossible moral combinations.
but my key, rusty and twisted, could not turn in the lock.

I fought until my hands grew too numb to feel your flesh beneath them.
I dove into veins, swam through the blues and reds
of a nervous system web.

All this, but still
When I reached
I could not touch it.
When I lifted my brush
I could not paint it.

Tree rings wrap themselves around my left arm.
Thick bands for every year I have spent
drenched and saturated by your rainstorm.
Thin for every year I have stood lonely in the desert.
The harder I search for the answer
the thinner they become.

One night the tree begins to bloom.
It is so beautiful.
I almost mistake your hand on my face
for her weeping branches.
But you tell me,
lips sanguine with awe,
that you are no longer afraid.
As our bodies cling and tense and pulse together
the bark on our tree begins to crack and curl back.
When her golden flowers drop and decay on our sweaty backs
we do not notice.
Afterwards, even has my heart slows to its normal rhythm,
I begin to search again,
and while my back is turned
you slip away.

I wish there had been someone to tell me,
It’s ok
You’re already there.