Quartet (One Sleeping, Two Crying, One Trying Not to Cry)

There has been a terrible mistake,

the woman tells us, her eyes filling with tears

that she does not let spill over and down 

her cheeks, as I do mine, as you do yours.

I feel plunged in sudden darkness and silence

and I move my hand like a blind person

searching for a wall to lean against, 

trying to find your hand. Your fingers

link with mine and not for the first time

I notice how soft your hands are; it is like

you have never used them for anything hard.

Her lips are moving, her eyes are looking down

at the folder open on her desk; every now and again

she glances up, but it is obviously too painful 

and so she looks down at her folder again.

I can't hear anything she is saying, I will need you

to repeat it back to me a thousand thousand times

from today until we are dead. 

My insides feel hollow, as though freshly dug out;

I had this feeling the first time we met you,

but it was a pleasant sensation then.

As we passed row after row of little beds, hopeful

faces watching us pass, sinking back into pillows once

we had moved on, I swear I could feel

the wind rushing through my stomach, my lower abdomen,

cleansing me of what was never there.

Now, you are lying at our feet, asleep, curled around

a stuffed rabbit. There has been a terrible mistake,

they tell me, and the emptiness I feel in my body

is the size and shape of you, although you were never there.

When you want something more than your own life,

lifetimes get poured into days, into hours; even minutes

are celestial eons. How much time is now on the brink

of disappearing? How many seconds, milliseconds, birthdays?

Am I already resigned  to this? You are not even gone, yet.

Yet. Yet. 

At my feet you begin to stir out of sleep, roused by the sadness perhaps, 

or the sound that is made my sadnesses, and I think how awful

it is that you are waking up right now, right at this moment. 

So I sink to the floor and burrow myself against your smallness

and whisper, go back to sleep, although you don't know our language.

Not yet.