Brushes With The Dark Law

 An elegy for one of my dearest friends, Layne Drebin Murphy, to be published in the Fall, 2024 issue of the Adanna Literary Journal

 She Walks Out to Twist the Plot

for Layne

You’d walked out this door
so many times. This last time
your walking made the dusk transparent. You walked
out barely catching light; I did not notice.
 
As always you were dressed
in rocket ships and perfect colors.
A lampshade on your head.
A purpose in your step.
A husband in tow in the passenger seat.
 
The night before your laughter was unfettered,
and your eyes confirmed your confidence
in unfinished stories.  Before you snoozed,
leaning on your human helpmeet,
we watched bad TV,
you anthropomorphized our dogs,
and then snored softly on your way
out of our lives.
 
Dogs, cats, llamas and Yo La Tengo in the safe box
of your carefully written stories.
You shoved those stories in your pocket
with each mortal step.  I did not notice.
 
Stories of barriers beaten down, artful struggles
of a righteous woman, though more comptroller
than complement in marriage, friendship, and business.
 
For the last time again, this time firm
and numinous and finally happy in your maturity–
you walked from one continent to another.
You walked with new steps,
exactly the person you thought you’d be.
 
And you took the incompletion, the glorious incompletion
away forever.  A raft of stories
floating in your secrets, floating in the space ahead.
Unfolding in the pages you will never write.
 
You walked out to twist the plot.
But with every possible glorious story
left open-ended for us.  Notable stories only possible
in the space of your bright absence.
 
A woman’s substance fading with each step.
An absence measuring what’s left of us.
Yet no presence speaks as eloquently as your absence.
No music so haunting as the sound of your steps
walking out the door, on the gravel, around the corner.
 
I did not hear that you were walking away.