BB Grey–musings

I thought how lucky I’d been —
you plunged both hands into my chest,
fished the last beast out by its roots,
proud as some surgeon of sorrow.
You called it mercy. I called it vacancy.
A wind now whistles through the chamber
where furious heat once kept me warm.

We die on hills we did not choose, and some we do,
plant flags with hands we trusted,
dig because someone taught us digging meant purpose.
Kneeling in the valley, we polish our blisters
and say we are grateful for the dirt.
Lucky, they taught us to say. Lucky.

I had a minority of myself — enough to be a cause,
a dented key that might have opened a scream so wide
it would have shook the leaves from the trees.
Instead I stitched my mouth shut, learned Morse with my ribs,
sent telegraph pulses into weather-readers’ skies,
hoping a Navajo, or God, would decode the pattern.

There were shoulders of giants, yes,
but when you are small, every silhouette is Everest.
I climbed, convinced the slope was meaning;
time, that quiet tyrant, made me sit, then stay.
Now getting up feels like lifting the ocean.
The gravity of silence is an enormous thing.

You took the heart, did you stuff it into a box?
Is it a specimen, a trophy on a shelf, turned stone?
Does it ever beat, frantic against the glass, like gulls
against a lighthouse window? You made its retrieval
my life’s work: as if finding a box could fix the sea.
As if the getting-back mattered more than the going-home.

Out here the ocean keeps a different score:
tidal absences, the slow, patient erosion of names.
I stand, a small thing, in a vastness that does not care
if I am called lucky or brave or merely vacant.
There is a hole where something fierce once lived,
it is honest, brutally indifferent, salt in the mouth.

So keep your jars and flags and tidy trophies.
I will learn to read the weather by myself,
translate my own pulses into a map,
walk the long road that leads to an empty shore.
If you ever miss the rhythm you removed, listen,
a wind whistles through the chamber. It carries my tide.