The Loss
Dismay and grief contend for room. The upper hand is gained at first by grief; this much I understand.
It has colour and a shape familiar to the eye.
The taste is sharp: the earth breaks open; grief says cry.
Grief is for something lost, a place where someone stood. Its dimensions are the same as the vanished good.
Out of it may come a thought, a fresh resolve; endured and done with, it allows for love.
But the future, not the past is the dominion of dismay. In this bleak emporium nothing is on display.
Just vacant shelves and long cold sweating floors.
Nothing belongs, nothing fits. Are there no doors?
If it were grand, heroic, demanding an attitude, I could be decent or brave, make choices, stand unbowed; but dismay is private, unpromising and small: things that have gone badly; a face turned to the wall.
All you might notice — no origin, nor sound — is something darkish, bruised, spreading underground.
Can you be accompanied in this unquiet domain? I think not. Its nature, uneasy, not quite pain, is only made for one. And almost as relief I would embrace the clean exigencies of grief.
Beatrice Garland
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