Daisy a Day

I’ll give you

The bell above the candy store door ringing again and again because I kept pushing it with my shoulder to hear her laugh (and because the boy wanted candies), that laugh that even now comes back to me before the memory of her face does, before the hospital smell and the rain-dark hill and the white daisy stem bent in my fingers, and the jars of striped peppermints shining red in the afternoon light while she says don’t spoil that boy now though her hand already slipping into mine beneath the counter where nobody could see except perhaps the child standing there with his solemn eyes pretending not to notice the secret life of grown people.

a daisy

And the room afterward all whiteness and metal rails and water sweating untouched beside the bed while her breathing moved in little frail sounds like paper rubbed together, though at the same time she is 19 again beside me beneath the sycamores asking if I mean it truly mean it when I tell her I will love her until the rivers themselves stop their running, and her hair not grey but black as wet earth after rain, and somebody somewhere saying sir you should get some rest though they cannot understand that rest became impossible from the first evening she laid her head against my shoulder and turned the whole world into something I feared losing.

a day

The hill behind the church with frost whitening the grass and my knees exploding before I even begin the climb, carrying the daisy carefully because the wind is sharp today and I am thinking how she used to press flowers between Bible pages though we never opened the fraying tooled leather except at Christmas and Easter and funerals, and then suddenly summer again, her bare arms brown from hanging clothes in the yard, singing softly to herself while I stand watching from the porch with the terrible astonishment of young men who cannot believe such happiness would consent to choose them from among all the others condemned merely to labour and endure.

I’ll give you

And the smiling doctor speaking in that low voice smiling doctors learn somewhere, a voice already surrendering before the words arrive, while her thumb moves once against the back of my hand and for an instant I am seized not by grief but by the absurd certainty that afterward I must still stop by the store for peppermints because she likes them beside the bed, and then years later — or perhaps only minutes, because time afterward no longer obeyed the old laws — I am standing before the candy jars again watching my own reflection tremble in the glass where her reflection ought to be beside it, hearing the bell above the door and turning halfway to speak to her before remembering, though the remembering never comes all at once anymore but slowly, like cold entering a room through cracks too small to see.

a daisy a day

And nights sometimes I wake convinced she has just called my name from another part of the house, the young voice not the old one, the voice from before children buried and seasons failed and pain settled into our bones, and I lie there listening to the dark while the rivers continue their running somewhere beyond town and the wind moves through the trees outside exactly as it did the first night I held her hand, exactly as it will after they carry me up the same hill and leave us there together beneath the tremulous grass and the white daisy stem bent in my fingers, where no forgetting can reach us anymore.

I’ll love you until the rivers run still And the four winds we know blow away

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BB8G0SFmJ1g