Not a Word

There’s an argument, a good one,
That consolation requires hope.
Respectfully, we disagree.

Hope and meaning are entangled
As tumbling eagles, and they can
Look like consolation against

The blinding sun. Ask Walt Whitman.
But the greatest consolation,
The most valuable, breaks apart

From the living passions giving
Absorbing reasons to behave
As if you hadn’t been grieving.

If you are possessed by meaning
And hope, you are engaged to life,
Too busy for consolation

Most of the time. Consolation
Must be more more than a portmanteau
Filled with spare supplies of meaning

And tightly packed reasons for hope.
Let life be random, death certain,
Meaning mere human invention—

Then what? Give us consolation
When you can’t give us any hope,
And we will be truly consoled.

Let us be overwhelmed and sad
As Dahlia Ravikovitch
Seeking after her lost father

Who was killed, but no one told her.
Don’t shroud such absence in meanings
And threadbare narratives of hope.

Such consolation as she got,
She got by staring down that road
Where, she later learned, he’d been killed.

If there’s any consolation
It has to embrace the absence
That can’t speak. Let us be that road.