Cornered

Sometimes the emotional cacophony of my grief is too alive, reverberates too intimately, to write with confidence.  Instead, I have devoured three poetry books in the last week. 

This one is haunting, for me, in its calm turned desperation.            

Corners

by (U.S. Poet Laureate) Kay Ryan

All but saints

and hermits
mean to paint
themselves
toward an exit

leaving a

peasant ocean
of azure or jonquil
ending neatly
at the doorsill.

But sometimes

something happens:
a minor dislocation
by which the doors
and windows
undergo a
small rotation
to the left a little
-but repeatedly.
It isn’t
obvious immediately.

Only toward evening

and from the
farthest corners
of the houses
of the painters

comes a chorus

of individual keening

as of kenneled dogs

someone is mistreating.

None of our planning, none of the doctor's lame assurances, none of their insistence that I was overreacting, none of their delayed interventions, could interfere with the tiny propulsions away from Zachary's beautiful future.  Those incremental shifts pushed his brain to the point of hemorrhage.  Cornered him, dead.