Still Life

Resiliency is the power of a relationship to be broken over and over again and to be remade anew.  How is that possible? Why is it that the alchemy of
some relationships allows the same ingredients to remixed into something new and stronger and some to to dissolve into nothingness?  This poem was written out of fear and despair; fear that I was losing someone and something ineffable but required.  Despair that the loss was of my own doing.  I struck out the last line, wisely, I think. "Your misfortune to have married a wayward poet."  That would have justified behavior that was not art at all, merely base and self-indulgent.

The key phrase that was the genesis of the poem was 'desultory fragmentation' - separation that was random, unplanned, stupid, without focus or purpose.  Like a child dropping a Christmas ball . . . symballein . . .a symbol . . .thrown down together to reveal . . . what?


poetic still live
  desultory
                        fragmentation,
a shattered lump of glass.
No unifying vision of love -
         just your delicate presence
in scattered books    clothes on the floor
in little piles     newspaper clippings       old
birthday cards and letters tied in ribbons.
mutely I stare
      but see only fragments
                                  shards of glass
perilously catching the sunlight
   holding to that which is good
                                              (barely)