Period Preparatory -- a poem.

It’s strange
that after three weeks of answering 8 o’clock phone calls thinking

This will be it

and the one that is it

is preceeded only by another murmur of indignation thinking

Who on earth calls at 8 o'clock at night?

3 weeks of thinking every 8 o'clock call will be the one announcing that we need to
stop our clocks
cover our mirrors
and
bring out the black crepe to blot our eyes.

and the one call does not do any of these things.

we do not stop the clocks or cover the mirrors.
The black crepe does not make an appearance, nor do the floods of tears.

My mother goes back to work
My father turns on the television
And me?

I

f  l  o  a  t,

an untethered balloon,
afraid that to do anything other than mourn will mean
that she was a trivial thing,
that I did not love her.

I have been answering 8 o’clock calls for three weeks,
for a  month and a half,
since before Christmas,
since forever,
thinking
This will be it.

And this is it.

And I find I have no tears to cry.

Only a kind of small hole in my heart,
as though all the tears
have already leaked out in preparation.

---

My great-aunt died yesterday. I didn't really know what to do with myself. She'd been suffering for a long time, and death was kind of for the best at this point. I still didn't know what to do with myself.

So I wrote a poem.

A "Period Preparatory" is a time frame before something else happens -- the phrase as it is seen here is usually "Period Preparatory to War" a pre-mobilization phase of planning and readiness.