Getting To Know You

Getting to know you after your death,
getting to know more about you
no new data, just my mind and heart 
working together day and night

combing through rooms full of old files
some full of the marvels of being young,
some documenting deep fears so dire
they called for all sorts of dishonesty,

files without a catalog, so heart and mind,
stumble together from one to the next
I’m rarely aware of the investigation,
I get only irregular cryptic reports

some of which are so obscure I am
completely baffled by them and irritated
there are questions I’d like to ask you,
yes, I would like to have a live witness

but even with the meager means at hand,
the investigation makes some progress
you were not who I thought you were,
you lied more than I thought, by omission

and by invention, love made me gullible
so I was fully party to most of your lies,
you didn’t lie from malice or from greed,
but trying to shed the skin of shame you wore.

You are diminished in my eyes and yet I
remember gratefully the pleasures of you,
when you were the imaginary one that you 
and I constructed  so very long ago


2014