SECOND GHAZAL FOR TRISH

 

There's no burying you, no risk of forgetting;

though you would say the past is merely escape.

Whatever truce you made with life was brief,

its tentative agreements offering you no escape.

We were so young, what could we have known?

But I knew, even then, that love was more than escape.

Some days we read for hours, daylight shifting.

You said that poetry was the opposite of escape.

It was, we imagined, you and me against the world,

until the world itself managed to escape.

In the end, you pulled away from everyone,

your stubborn isolation a poor imitation of escape.

The prayer I offer now is one of silence,

the unspoken understanding of no escape.