Fivehundredandone Days of Darkness
Are done.
On the day you were hit by a car
in Brooklyn
I was in Bolivia, standing on the edge of a forest, listening
to a chorus of birds.
You had messaged me the night before:
Aww I bet you’re feeling all the feelings!! Glad Inara is with you. Can’t wait for you to get back here. We’re moving end of September and hoping to be a little closer to you. Safe travels bun!! ❤️
A broken promise
crushed on the pavement at the intersection of Buffalo Ave and Pacific St.
at approximately 2:50 pm.
Did you look up and see the car before it hit you
full speed in reverse?
Did someone come to hold your hand as you lay on the pavement?
What was the driver thinking
when he sped from the scene?
I have often wondered, since that day
if we should all walk around New York City
with helmets on our heads
to shield against the pain that is always
waiting
one instant, one acceleration,
one note in the reverberating call of a crested Oropendola
away.
After the accident they took you to Kings County Hospital,
that red-brick behemoth across from Peter and Rai’s place
with its smoke stacks and towers that look like they belong
to another century.
Nessy told me later your body was
unscathed,
save from some scratches on your foot,
all the damage concentrated
in your brain. I thought
leave it to Mimi to look put together
her soft skin drinking in the late summer sunlight
even at the doorstep
of death.
But you didn’t pass through
that portal you stayed
in the void
of darkness
of nonexistence
suspended in the vestibule
of unresolve.
I thought I could reach you there with my voice,
recording and sending you chapters of Joan Didion’s
We Tell Ourselves Stories in Order to Live
the thick text like penitence at my bedside
until I realized I was reading
to keep myself alive.
It's like you retreated to that place
you painted
in the series Dead of Night.
Giant chiaroscuro oil and glaze canvases
depicting the anthropomorphic flesh
of a deer carcass
being flayed.
In your artist’s statement you wrote:
Nothing is more provocative, more esoteric to me than my own blood… I objectify the grotesque with a ghostlike elegance. The carcass is the vessel of the soul. Painting mediates my desire to transcend the carnal tragedy of being human. I have spent life searching for a seam in the flesh of reality and it has left me raw, like a piece of meat.
You awoke, six weeks
later but not
to life.
The world had been reconfigured
And we did not have a place at your side.
Your mother and Creecy moved you to Shepherd’s
and we thought if anyone
can help reconstruct the neural pathways in
your brain
it would be this team of gentle, expert herders
nursing movement back into
your fingers and toes,
coaxing language from the shattered recesses of
memory
animating vitality into your spirit
that emerged at first only
in fits
of anger and rage.
Marci told me that one day
you flipped off the nurse
managing to summon the words
F U C K Y O U U U U U U U U
and i said
that’s our girl
she’s in there somewhere, screaming to get out.
But then
inexplicably
they kept us from you. No visitors,
your mother said, even though everyone knows
the best medicine for brain trauma
is to be surrounded by familiar beacons
in the constellation
of people you loved.
It was like she was trying to rewrite the story
of your long estrangement
from your family of birth,
to cut out the pieces of the family that you chose,
and replace them
with a fantasy
of maternal love.
~
I’m not sure when we lost you definitively.
Maybe it was when they pulled you out of Shepherd’s
suddenly, against the doctor’s advice.
Maybe it was when they took you off your meds
and you went into convulsions.
Maybe it was when they attempted to reconstruct and re-affix
the flaps of your skull
or
in the midst of one of your episodes
when they had to force a helmet over your exposed brain
and strap your arms to the bed.
Maybe it was when you were taken to the hospital in
Manteo
That picturesque, tortured town you ran away from
at 18.
Where the staff said they wouldn’t release you to your family
because it wasn’t safe.
And where you stayed
hooked up to a feeding tube
for weeks.
~
Bunny, remember that time we drove to Fort Tilden
at dawn?
The shoreline was deserted
just the seabirds swooping
overhead.
We found the beach adorned by a congregation
of red roses
washed up from the sea
discarded by some passing ship,
we mused, as we extended our tanned, topless bodies
across the golden sand.
You wrote to me once that you look back on that time we shared in New York
and see what magic it was.
And then somehow here we both were, back in the city
innumerable lifetimes later
trying to build a life
both swimming upstream in a river
of debris.
Our orbits came back together,
cosmically realigned
and you were my lifeline
for a brief and glorious
window of time.
You were no longer painting
now an architect
at a fancy Brooklyn firm.
Trying to pay off your debts,
divorcing Leon, who I never even met.
And i
a mother
back in school. Back on this continent.
Barely keeping my head
above the current’s crushing waves.
You took me to that Alex Cameron concert
at Webster Hall
and we swooned at his crooning voice and
gyrating hips
you listening with your good ear, your elbow hooked like a buoy
to my left arm.
That woman in the bathroom
said my hair was like a mermaid’s and we giggled
like schoolgirls.
We skipped out on the bar early and went instead
to a diner
where we talked over tear-stained plates of greasy eggs
till dawn.
I slept at your place in Edgewood that night
and in the morning
I watched the early summer sunlight
dance across your shoulder and the slope
of your neck.
~
After Manteo, i lost track.
A rehabilitation center in Virginia.
A residential facility in North Carolina.
Nessy flew to Raleigh to visit you
And they wouldn’t let her
into the room.
Your extended state of darkness ended
on December 28, 2023,
501 days after the collision that took you from us
in an instant
on a summer’s day in Crown Heights
on the unhappy day of your sixth wedding anniversary.
I can’t hold onto you
on the pavement
or by your bedside.
I was never able to grasp your hand.
So i remember you in the only place you were ever truly fulfilled
with a vision and a paintbrush in hand,
your words to me in an old letter setting you
finally
free
into the soft forest of eternity:
Tonight I am freaking out because I have to wait for the paint to dry before I can continue working. I feel it is the only place I have ever truly existed. I think about particles of pigment like they are atoms in the worlds I'm creating.... Someday I want my studio to be a barn in the middle of the woods away from humanity and technology. Somewhere cheap with a lot of green stuff and big skies where I can stretch out.
Ah... Life... everyday I wake up and wonder how the hell I got here.
In loving memory of Mimi Silver Liebenberg
August 27, 1985 - December 28, 2023.