Nine Years of Mourning

When my grief finally breaks
I shed the embarrassment
of mourning like a skin.

I have been sick with grief,
heavy with it, entombed by it
for so long I have atrophied
within it.

Unable to escape it, unwilling
to let her go again again again again
I treated grief as atonement,
punishment for her death.

Now I see
it was the perfect counter weight
for my love.

There is snap, a snip of umbilicus.
We slide apart. I step away.

Today I climb out of my skin;
my mourning dress. I am nude and white
as a stripped willow branch. I leave the dress behind;
stiff with the sweat of surviving.

I leave behind its brutal blacks,
its corset; so like the mouth
of a fledgling wanting more.
Only I know the comfort
of the pink inside of that dress.

It is time now. Now