Grief

Grief-as I knew it, died many times. It

died trying to reunite with other lesser

deaths. Each morning I lay out my

children's clothing to cover their grief.

The grief remains but is changed by

what it is covered with. A picture of

oblivion is not the same as oblivion.

My grief is not the same as my pain. My

mother was a mathematician so I tried

to calculate my grief. My father was an

engineer so I tried to build a box around

my grief, along with a small wooden

bed that grief could lie down on. The

texts kept interrupting my grief, forcing

me to speak about nothing. If you cut

out a rectangle of a perfectly blue sky,

no clouds, no wind, no birds, frame it

with a blue frame, place it faceup on

the floor of an empty museum with an

open atrium to the sky, that is grief.