GRIEF Poem: SPLIT OPEN, by Megan Wildhood

for a longtime friend whose adult child died a week before Thanksgiving 2017

We had just turned back the clocks:
we who are left stuck here had gotten more time.

Or really, nowadays, most of them turn themselves back.
How does who control what?

Remember when we thought it was parents?
When we chewed our nails as we asked

what happens to kids who paint badly.
How about who break toys? Leave the windows open?

Then, after so many years passed
in a horrible blur, we were the ones being asked.

Long before that, we had started carrying too-small bags
too full to close all the way, on our narrow shoulders

through the swamp under hot sky like our moms.
We were too soon wordlessly asked to commence aligning planks

of wood and triangulation and generational silence
to make something, anything, sure on shifting soil.

How long will anyone have to close up all the long, thin holes
between what can be counted on, to carry what they carry?

The doorknobs God booby-trapped the world with
fall off in my hands when I turn them and I fall to pieces.

Do I even want to strive so hard to find openings anymore?
To know how who controls what?

Maybe I will just make the floor again, get all those
brittle boards to kiss in this inviolably unfixable world.