I'd been avoiding this.
I'd really, really been avoiding this.
This poem speaks to a level of reconciling with the past I don't think either of us could've written until recently. Speaking of a sense of dull ache that isn't quite nostalgia, but isn't quite melancholy, either. It's in the place where the past isn't okay, but it's better than it was, and there isn't really a sense of what is left.
The open tone of this is both chilling and not. I keep reading and rereading, wondering if it has a place or if there needs to be a tweak, somewhere. It feels like there's everything about you in here, but at the same time— I feel your last lines ring a little false because there seems to be breadcrumbs of how you feel, but there's that spark of denial.
I feel like this poem belongs as a bridge and is not a poem in and of itself. There is the end of a beginning, alluding to something else not quite remembered. There is the beginning of an end, unresolved in limbo. There is a middle, full of imagery that leaves hints for what is to come but everything delivered so plainly we have to make up our own minds.
In the end, this is a poem of ghosts. I feel like the one thing that could use a touch of clarity, or closure, take your pick, is the line you are always with me. There is the patchwork of loneliness but there isn't any single bit of confirmation for what direction it had turned, and I feel that's the whisper between the trees trying to become a voice. You begin with togetherness but do not actually end telling us how it turned out.
Which, I suppose, is the point. Uncertainty if the ending is even something to remark on.
The only part of this I remember is the opening quoted stanza and the final one. Stanza 2 feels like it could start a poem but not this one, stanza 3 feels too plain but at the same time so rich I want to choke (but it feels like it's only because I have some inkling as to what that is referencing, the way magic tends to go away but at the same time become so much more vivid the longer you go between visits), but all of them are independent. Yet together. And I can't tell if I want anything to change.
Make of this what you will.
~Rosey
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