Disappearing You
I cut up your driver’s license,
passport, ID cards
—hate the sacrilege of slicing through
the photographs, halving your smile—
I erase you from our bank account,
health care, retirement funds.
At each stage you are a little more gone, as I slowly
banish you from what had been our life.
As I pack up your dresses, jackets, hats,
and coats to give them away, I remember
you splendid at a party in your gold jacket, can feel you
bundled in the folds of your puffy winter coat
and the sweet honey-hay smell of your hair as I held you
on a chilly night. All your sequined sweaters
and tops in flickering rainbows of silver and gold,
now in the dark again. And you so loved to glitter!
All your precious possessions will soon be lost to me.
Too soon, there will be only my imperfect memory.
But my niece has your arctic fox fur coat,
and my sisters have some of your rings,
so you will persist a while in someone’s thoughts.
And someone somewhere will be cuddled and warm on a winter’s night,
or wearing a sequined sweater at a sleepover,
or will parade across a stage magnificent in that gold jacket.
But all these cues to my memories of you will be gone,
and I have made you so—disappeared,
like the white arctic fox—
invisible against the snow.
© Michael Fallon
Michael Fallon is the author of 5 published collections of poetry: A History of the Color Black, Dolphin-Moon Press, 1991; Since You Have No Body, winner of the Plan B Press Poetry Chapbook Competition, 2011; The Great Before and After, BrickHouse Books, 2011, the self- published, Empire of Leaves, Singing Man Press, 2018, and Leaf Notes: Poems of the Plague Years, published by Writer’s Relief, which won the 2021 Water Sedge Poetry Prize.
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