From: fruchter@nexus.yorku.ca (Peter Fruchter) Date: Wed, 3 Dec 1997 18:25:35 -0500 To: clburke@forest.fscinternet.com, cburke@nexus.yorku.ca
i caught up on the diary last night. i will write my good-bye poem for kitten in this message - you can regard it as the regret of a killer.
what a shallow convenience to think acquaintanceship to have been my choice. your partner, in one of 3 moments of truth-functional honesty, admitted to having been exhilarated when i was first out of the picture. but i, shallow israeli knight, was still repeating the questions "If not I, who? If not now, when?"
you might even have helped hold it together if you'd lowered or opened - i'll never know which it is, so it's probably both - yourself to counting blessings.
to think i spent a year and a half - and all the time before that - repeating: "Look, I can sweat as well as any truth-functional hatred!" how nice that patience has limits. how nice that i finally understand some limits are nice.
i know you disagree - i think that too is nice. more signs of life in the world. but i suspect you'll claim to not understand. if so, no one doubts your partner is more dedicated to being a dictionary than i - life being evil and all that. i no longer am.
now, for you most of all because you loved him.... i write this with tears.
We were laughing when we named you Jesus.
We were fierce and free,
and you were such grace made flesh
that in your gaze moments were forever.
I remember the world bending
to your silent incantations
- it couldn't be your fumbling feet -
and your vanishings...
In fairness, perhaps
to spheres undignified by you.
I remember how you burst back in
from corners of an eye,
on the breath between a blink
saying, "Hold me now. I love you -
I am fierce."
How long before your undeniable heart
was beating through us too,
drumming our abstracted silences
a vapouring beneath the thunder?
How long before the clan of us
was shouting "Jeeeesus!" in the rain
and chirping at bushes?
I remember your foregoings,
the conclusive entrances of your returns
- a sunlight flashlight through the night -
rain, snow, earth, the very seasons
glittering your midnight arctic cloak, singing,
"I have grappled unknowns by the throat.
Dry me. Feed me.
I have returned."
And when you did not return..
the silent night of muffled questions
in the dead of winter for a year...
But you remembered us.
When we found you broken
on an operating table,
spine crushed,
beset by soot-sayers
- "Walk? Well, he might live," -
you smiled, you smiled at us
dear heart and sang again,
"An unknown has grappled me too well.
Take me away from all this now.
We are returned."
And so we were.
It was spring for seven years;
a leaping spring,
a spring of leapings,
and oh, but how you lived.
And how you walked,
just as you loved,
on the wild side.
You taught us a feral love,
and every week another lyric
for the singing of it.
But now we called you Kitten
because one ressurection was enough.
Seven years of spring...
When spring was ended
- and summer too,
when another prophecy of doom
ushered the winter of our hearts,
it was by my words
by my eyes
by my side
that you died.
Did I hold you well enough
my love?
Will you wait for me,
my love?
Oh, wake my heart.
Oh, wake again.