Implacable Wheel

Dark Moon – December 23, 2022
May 2019

Anticipating company, the relief of losing herself to the painting, and chocolate, she makes her way through the fog in her mind, the pain in her heart to the painting studio.  This is where the one who paints and the one who grieves, like the miracle of cell division become two, so deeply connected yet separate.

It has been seventeen months since he died.  Seventeen months.  A year and five months. This means nothing and everything to her.  Seventeen months nailed to the Implacable Wheel of disemboweling grief.   It is May, her second spring without him.  Without herself.  They met in February, blossomed into spring.  He was so familiar, yet unknown.  Love.  

A turning of the Wheel she willingly surrendered to, its magnetic pull irresistible.  Round and round in a sweet, sometimes painful anticipation. Her nerves strung tight and quivering to sensation, to touch, to a glimpse of his face, his entering into her body.  

And now, thirty-nine years later another turn of the same wheel to a different time of life, to the winter of a life, demanding surrender, leaving no choice.  The Wheel turned and he flew off, leaving her filled first with numb astonishment, then  grueling pain and alone with yearnings never to be met again.  How can the sweetest wheel become a torture.  Shadows flickered, yes.  Her mother’s death,  his father and mother’s death.  His stepmother.  Beloved friends and animals. Rehearsals.  But they had each other.

The painter chooses reds and oranges, blues and blacks.  The grieving woman emerges under her brush splayed on this Holy wheel, the alchemical fire at her feet.  Fear etches her face, and a kind of bewilderment.  While the hands of her dead offer encouragement, if not comfort.

She never could have imagined the agony of his death.  Her body tied to the rack – time spins, she does not move on.  Cannot.  She knows this is a necessary rite of love.  

Looking at the grieving woman, the painting one thinks of the old Vaudeville acts, the woman tied to the wheel, her body a blur, the wheel spinning, the man whistling daggers through the air passing her ear, her breast, between her legs, to land in an outline around her body.  “Who would entrust themselves to so much risk,” she had wondered.

But she had, this woman who grieves.  To love.  To life.  Francis Weller says, “to love is to accept the rites of grief.”  She did.  She does.  And the daggers fly, not out of maliciousness, or trickery, but from the world of the twin side of love.  The daggers fly, landing in the flesh of her heart, her womb, cutting the ties between them.