I Remember Willy

I would not give grief up for the world.

It reminds me I'm awake.

Tears burn, remembrance hurts, the pearled

necklace of the years must break

into jagged shards of distant light.

The worm of emptiness eviscerates

the rind, turns sweet to bitter bite,

and all that was my gold is gone:

The little one whose tawny fur

I still smell, clutching Santa Claus

with all his stuffing out in paws

ragged as tufts of butterbur.

Now I cling that toy all night,

as if there is some magic rhyme

in memory, and sympathy in things.

Yet on my grieving heart there waits,

without a murmur of the dawn,

a comforter with patient wings -

the silent server, time.