My Fingers Lost and Found Their Voice
My fingers used to FLY over the keys
Blurred in their flurry to write
Words appearing so quickly
It was hard to keep up
Until my man dog, Buster, died
Grief will take the wind out of your sails
Leaving you deflated, sad, lonely
It will silence your voice for a time
Almost as if your voice has to heal
Recover from the rawness of shedding all those tears
On a horrifying thief of a Tuesday night in a December years ago
You suddenly find your life a corpse
Stitched together with uneven stitches as in an autopsy
Turned upside down and inside out and ugly, exposed
The sutures broad, tight, unforgiving, paralyzing
Holding your thoughts for ransom in a world gone grey
Without the only thing that ever colored your life happy
Your fur child, your companion, your friend
The years finally pass; the sutures finally rot and dissolve and
Your fingers free themselves from the grief
The words come quickly again
Spilling onto the page like alphabet soup
But the grief will never be done with you
It rears its ugly head when you least expect it
You catch a familiar whiff in the air and find the memory it stirs is tinged with joy and grief
At the same time
Unlikely, improbable, crazy - I know
But there it is
Memory is a tricky thing
The memories you want to lose are made of the kind of glue they use
To stick price tags on Christmas gifts
Impossible to remove
The remnants remain decades later when you find the boxes
In the attics and cellars of estate sales
The glue becomes a part of who you are
Later in life you find yourself thinking
“I wouldn’t have it any other way.”
As your fingers release the words you need to say
On a sunny August afternoon
