Celestial Whale

Dark Moon, October 25, 2022

March 4, 2019

I don’t know how to write of her.  It must have been one of the thickly veiled days, a day of rising grief fogging my mind.  

My body, filled with a leaden darkness.  I lay myself down in black paint, the grieving one, in thick outlines.  A murder scene?  Of sorts.  It has been fifteen months.  A year and three months.  

I am learning to paint sorrow.  I look at her, standing tall staring straight into my eyes, her face marked by loss, and being lost.

I don’t know why I do this, load up the brush thick with white oxide, wide strokes reveal a rib cage flaring from just below her, my? breasts, beyond our body.  In our hands we hold a heart shattered, which becomes a heart surrounded by blue.  His blue.  

Stepping back I see we stand within another body.  Who?  What?  

I am nothing inside the whale, echoes inside me.  “I am nothing inside the whale.”  A line from a beloved poem given to me once, as an oracle.  A woman climbs inside the skeletal body of a beached whale, her self dissolves into other, into all.  She is no thing.

I am no thing since the breaking open moments of your death.  I am no thing inside the enormity of this most painful Mystery.  Yet there is a terrible beauty there in the bones that once carried flesh, nursed young, made love, made art, made beauty. How I long to unearth your bones, clean and polish them with the juice of lemons, lay them in bleaching sun on a hillside. To sing over them as the Greek women once did.  

For a moment I close my yes, feel myself carried, protected by the arcing rib cage, a boat moving through the night sea and sky.   I am nothing inside the whale.  I am no thing inside the Mystery.  No before, no after, just a woman held inside this ancient arc of life.  And death.  And mourning.  As is my beloved, as are we all.