Elsa

“Elsa and I” within a heart

is what we carved in the bark.

That was so long ago.

Yet the warm greyness

of this memory

is so appealing

it began snowing

inside of me.

Elsa and I are gone now.

She was all the words

that I would find

She was all the fights

that I would win

– now only a lean

string of mind –

yet she was the home

I didn't know I had.

Her darkbrown eyes

had silvery flakes

like some obsidian stones

like meteorites

reflected upon a lake.

I discovered that

my memories of her

have the power

to stop time.

Now when I make lemonade

I think of her,

of her hair flowing

between my fingers.

When I wake up from my daydream,

the world is about the same

as when I left it.

And though I can't recall

the exact texture of her hair

I believe I find it again

when I daydream of her

when I cry because I miss her.

Elsa passed away

ten years ago today.

Elsa and I will never be, ever again.

She will never again press

her head in my lap

squeeze my hand

for a reason known only to her.

Even back then she was eternal to me.

Such a being could never cease to be.

When I saw her on that hospital bed

in her heart she was ready

so she passed on to me

many memories of her, of us,

of her family.

She was a little over thirty,

and there she was, among the old,

dying before them all,

dying before she could spread

all the goodness she had in her.

What I would learn

in the next ten years

is that she had built us a home

here in the darkness

from which none

is supposed to return.

Elsa is now a collage

of memories

and sensations

emotions I kept

in some sort of box

which I enter

when I open it –

the house she built

with pictures on the walls

strands of hair on her pillow

wet footsteps on the bathroom floor

tangy lemonade on the back porch

with clinking ice cube and ready-to-fall straw

distant humming in some other room

her perfume drifting in and out of the draught

whispering in my ear, spooned on a hospital bed,

that everything is going to be all right

and she knew it would be for she had been there

and left the key to the house under the mat.

Now I could carve Elsa

on every tree there is

and it wouldn't bring her back.

I could shout her name to the skies

the clouds would remain mute.

I could read and read again

her last letter that I wouldn't

hear the tone of her voice.

Believe me, I have tried.

Yes, Elsa is no more.

“Move on against wind and tide,”

she told me to do that night

and, every once in a while,

come to see her, to say hello,

to have a lemonade and a chat,

to change the flowers

and cook us something nice.

Perhaps tell her a story,

my day at work

or a poem I wrote,

until she falls asleep

and I place a cushion

under her head

and tiptoe my way out

shutting the door behind me

look up at the summer stars

dry my tears

with the back of my hand

and with a sigh

wake up.