by Gabby Chumley
I want you to hear this pass from my lips
Before it passes from someone else’s:
There is a hymn dying softly
on the voice of a choir
a gentle beginning and a jarring, bitter end
There is snow;
There is silence and solitude
This deep-rooted, pervading isolation
You’ve carried with you since childhood
They didn’t teach you this with your catechisms
This juxtaposition of the half-dead and the living
I’ve found there is a malleability,
A yielding in absence
A tenderness only present in a wake
Rigor mortis in reverse
This is How the World Ends
We are mostly honest in childhood innocence
Fraudulent in age
I am beginning to believe that loving lies mostly in knowing
Familiarity breeds comfortably, which is not the same as contempt
Which is softer, more malleable
What I mean to say is that introductions and farewells both smart
It’s nice to meet you, it’s nice to have known you
I’d like to think we can retrace our steps
Tell me how the world ends,
Spins till it stops
I am not thinking of the Hollywood explosions
I am beginning to believe we’ll go quietly
A familiar silence that stretches on and on
The grey of post-storm-skies, the flat vastness of the sea
a handshake, a see-you-soon