Brenda Moossy & The Death of Poetry
Poetry died for me today. Poetry in the form of an East-Texas, overweight, sixty-something sweetheart, stained and mouthy, a firecracker Bodhisattva with the earthen name Yazbek, now stillborn in a bed in the backroom with a trio of old dogs. After a brief competition with cancer (we all know the score), Poetry slipped into the void on the back of a silver snake, coarse and wet with an endless length. She was wailing in the rolling ascent, rocking and wailing, gone for good. Amen.
Poetry was at home in Arkansas. The electricity went out for days under the hammer of ice and tooth-ache cold, the metallic, Mason-jar lid of an Ozark winter sky. One cannot breathe under such conditions. But that was always the plan. Poetry finds a crack in the most unlikely surface of time and sorrow. Poetry grows in spite of its harrowing circumstances, and Poetry dies, again and again, with only the slightest degree of change, tiny transformations witnessed in the radical minutia at the atomic level of our genetic selves, where babies gather their heavenly scent, where I will always love you and you will always love me. Poetry would have it no other way, like a flash of aromatic green at the precise moment the sun disappears below the horizon. Bring on the night: Poetry sleeps for the promise of a new day.
Poetry once confided in me, from the fat couch in the corner, her wisdom obscured by blue flickering television light reflected in the lenses of her glasses, that she could never cook a meal for just one. She always made enough for the house, and leftovers like an afterglow for weeks. Poetry was accessible like that, with an insatiable appetite for the joy that is us, together, around a table, tongues coated in a singular taste, swimming in the warm language of ‘we,’ present and engaged, the greatest care.
God almighty, you will be missed, Brenda Moossy, amen. My second mother, amen. You are a treasure, the blessed word itself, amen. Come back to us as soon as you can.
