For thirty years, I held
a picture of you
to my mirror,
transforming memory
to belief.
Kept colors, a complex pattern
of assumed identity, explained your place
in my history.
But time passed for you
without me as witness.
I didn’t see the slow distortion,
the twisted dissonance
of what you have become.
Of empathy’s slow disintegration.
Here in Ordinary Time,
I’ve been presented
a sad duty: to trim away
what has died, what is superfluous,
vestigial. It will damage
what I think I am, what I was.
But it must be done.
You have become a thing of harm.
As this small treasure diminishes,
the one that I held for so long,
a mid-winter moon looms above,
alive, that captive stranger,
bent to its work,
loosening the sky of its seeds,
falling. Another falling
has occurred.
And so, I let you go.
I relinquish you
to the void of lost stories,
to the sibilance of a hard rain.