ritual suicide

come share your sorrow with me
I am looking for the edges of these days
I hear your whisper
your arrowed sadness in this quiet
I dawdle on your precipice with you
but we are both afraid of heights

it's amusing
we two reactionaries
scorched by our own eyes
several times now
I say, always, it will make a poem
or a chapter in a new book
I pass my words on and save the letters
reading them years and days later

and you with your secrets and me
with my secrets and both of us
twining images to surround the melancholy
and the past
the edges of these days
are polished sharper by the poems
it is as if they are the knives
we'd like to throw ourselves upon

The title is a reference to the Japanese, Hari Kari. Ritual Suicide. Usually carried out to save face. I think we always needed to save face, and that certainly kept both of us from delivering and facing the truth of our relationship. I haven't looked at this poem in many years, so it was interesting to encounter it. Yet it sounds like everything else from that period. So, I ask myself, if this relationship made us both unhappy why did we pursue it for so many years? Because, I think, we could make each other laugh, and because the physical intimacy was singular. I never felt that way with any other women. Perhaps Alison did with other men, though she said she didn't. But, what can I trust to be true in all this? Only some of my words, and certainly not many of her's. Oh well. Time to dig in the midden some more and see what other chert and pot shards I can come up with. I worked for archaeologists for a long time, you know.