Lebensabschnittspartner

Sarthak Mukherji

Lebensabschnittspartner.

Life - section - partner.

A gorgeous German distillation

of something about as mystifying

as splitting an atom and the violence that follows,

the wondrous shine.

Have you ever sat with your hand on your side

covering a pain you can't quite understand

but as soon as you are diagnosed

a relief washes over you as this phantom

is lassoed by a definition.

Here is Lebensabschnittspartner for your wound.

They were your whole heart, your soul mate

but only till the expiration date.

They were before the March and April of you.

The right person for the time, the better loved and lost

rather than never loved at all.

Exactly who you needed to push you

and pull you, kicking and screaming,

into exactly who you needed to be now.

Your Lebensabschnittspartner.

Come lie in me, they said.

I shall be the snow to soothe you

before the spring of you rolls forward.

I will be gone but I shall water the earth

you will bud from, whether I want to or not.

I was the object of your ire,

thank me for the scars you acquired.

For the way I burned you so utterly.

For lessons you learned not later but early.

I brought you to the brink of the wire,

gave you the sating drink you desired

but oh, did I make your poor heart stir,

call me your Lebensabschnittspartner.

You breathed them for days, months, years.

They sat in your lungs,

ran the circuit of your body from legs to ears,

lapped it with their tongue

but now they’re just somebody

and you're not as young.

You look at the clock of your life,

the way it ticks forward.

You can't deny the gears

behind the face of it,

every misshapen one.

The way they clambered into place,

day after foreign day,

amongst the mechanism of your being.

Just another cog

but a whole new chain completed.

Is there anything as subtle

yet obvious as growth?

But you were there once, together.

Not three gears apart

but arm to goose pimpled arm

in a garden staring up at borrowed starlight.

Behind a house you both loved,

sometimes lamented,

for its warm corners and mouldy windows.

For the space it gave you,

the way it filled that space with bills.

You eventually left home behind for work,

or after you broke something

soft between those walls

and ran from the wreckage,

too much to clean.

You left because calling a house your home

does not qualify as rent

and all the real money was spent.

Take pictures in all the rooms you forgot to

in the midst of contentment,

in the midst of surviving.

Every room a living room, well lived rooms.

Your Lebensabschnittshaus.

The beloved chaos that is your dog

joined you on the deck, nuzzled your neck

just after lifting a leg by your one surviving plant.

They do not gaze at the light in the sky

just at you, as if you gave a tender glow.

Your dog taught you patience,

that after a day of reigning in and nipping

you will still abstain from moving

just to avoid losing the pressure of

something using you as a bed.

You are rest

for a few more years, for the rest of theirs.

Their mild weight stays in your lap

long after.

The one command they knew well,

stay.

Your Lebensabschnittshund

pissing on your Lebensabschnittspflanze.

In that moment, surrounded

by the currentness of your life,

an Abschnitt of your life,

do not worry about the next.

Accumulate with borrowed starlight.

Fight that moment,

embrace it,

weep for its passing,

for what it brought you and chiseled away.

You have no idea how long it will last,

how it made you,

you.

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Mentioned in this episode:

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Write After is a way to encourage poets to listen and write, and use National Poetry Month to highlight how listening to poetry makes us better poets. I know I write the best when I’m surrounded by beautiful poetry–it’s part of the reason I created this podcast, and I want to encourage others to share this practice. We'll get started in April. You can share to #WriteAfterOPO.

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