The Ungiving
After your father texted, “the pigeons have hatched!
I felt the gift of life,
and the immediate counterpart of it
merge across the English Channel,
felt it even in the threads
of my nightgown, pulling
the silk back into the worm that spewed it,
and I stood in the bedroom, naked
of death. Ungiven it.
In your father’s garden, everything
is life, which sometimes means “memory”—
the pebbles, the rose
from your Nan’s garden.
The frogspawn growing their chirps,
and the goldfish spawning—between them
the small pathway, the lilies and roses.
My love, there isn’t a way in this world
a feather on a stone will make anything lighter.
And I know, sadness
has dressed me, and trumpeted on.
Each time, wish I were a beginner, again
at my own grief. Skill-less and accidental.
To know nothing, and live.
We brought a small plant back home
from your father’s garden, at our last visit.
When you stand there, hovering over it
as if to make another leaf grow,
I remember, you, too, grew in that garden.
When you dress me,
because I can’t, you are life,
dressing me.
*
Nadine Hitchiner is a German poet and author of Practising Ascending (Cathexis Northwest Press, 2023), as well as the chapbook Bruises, Birthmarks & Other Calamities (Cathexis Northwest Press, 2021). She is a Pushcart Prize nominee and a 2023 Best of the Net Finalist. Her work has been published in The Lumiere Review, Bending Genres, Hayden’s Ferry Review and others. She lives in her hometown with her husband and their dog.
