Poem: A Word Before the Last, About Loss

“For I will go into the grave unto my son mourning”
Genesis 37:35

Precisely because you are alive
there is no comfort in this world.
Because wherever you are not
I search, and where I hear your step
you have not been or left a mark.
So the roads are trampled by one,
not two. And the past is maimed
by remembering more. Just as
an old man cannot live at peace
clutching a rag of stripes as proof
without a swish of snakes underneath,
without imagining profoundest dis-
ease that follows him — a body
of bones, a soul clanking around —
it is asking for comfort where
there is none, possessing the one
thing alive that has no end.

Linda Zisquit's “A Word Before the Last, About Loss” originally appeared in “Unopened Letters” (Sheep Meadow Press, Riverdale-on-Hudson, 1996) and reprinted in “Havoc: New and Selected Poems” (Sheep Meadow Press, Rhinebeck, N.Y., 2013)