CHAPTER 1 - Memorial Ballade for West

The bruise under my fingernail remains
Now two months and a half, since you are gone.
You grazed me, panicking beneath your pains,
With fangs I’d forced your medicine beyond.
I heal, it seems. It seems I must live on.
How long until I can no longer see
The closest thing to blood you’ve ever drawn?
The only injury you left on me?

Time will erase the loftiest of men
To vast and trunkless legs of stone. Still more
Will they erase your monuments, my friend:
The urn, the fur, the leash hung on the door.
My fingertip’s no longer even sore.
Would I could bear this wound perpetually—
As stained glass martyrs bleed forevermore—
The only injury you left on me.

But no. There are more wounds than this. Why else
In writing this would I be such a mess?
Each memory, of voice or paws or pelt,
Each aches, because it’s something you have left.
If any favors I am owed from Death?
May all of you, carved on my memory,
Heal not at all as long as I draw breath
And be the injury you left on me.

My precious pup, think not upon my claws
But bruised. I’ll heal before you next see me.
Beside you I’ll be fine. Your absence was
The only injury you left on me.