On Irony.

I found a strand of your hair today

dark against the white of the wall

it was tied up against itself

an arachnid skeleton

from some forgotten age

I couldn't look away

I kept seeing your hair

looking as if it were alive

in the ocean

swimming at its own jelly rhythm

separate from the thrashing of your arms

and how it picked up the light

and the salt and the sand

and still looked beautiful

dragged out behind you like a net

with treasures caught up in it

beating to be free

i caught my hand in it that day

each finger in its own coiled chain

with one loose curl wrapped around my wrist

like a shackle of silk

I did not notice the way it hardened

stiffening into small vertebraes

like the slender spines of some fossilized creature

it cracked under the weight of my hand

sounding like gravel crunched beneath my boots

and I realized I was caught and could not get free

At that point you too were stiff

with your fingers curled up in fists

as if you fought this last indignity

to be stripped of life, in public.

my hand was tight in your mass of hair

and my voice too

strectched like some current

that dredges up all the worst in me

they say i sat there cursing

over and over again the same word

until they cut my hand loose

from your mangled net of hair

and led me away

to check for injury they said.

i wonder if they were being ironic.

i wonder things like that

and i used to say them to you

and you would roll your eyes

telling me that no one is ironic anymore

merely sarcastic, with an occasional flash of wit.

I didn't believe you

but then i knew you.

you would have found it ironic

to have died on the day

we were to have begun a new life.

i suppose we still did.

i think i like the old one better.

i washed the hair down the drain

wondering if it was fitting

that water be there at every doom

every reminding of your leaving.