Darkness All Over

She was a caretaker
a creator a world beater
somehow taken down
by this numbing thing
so vital and so lost
all at once, as if time
compressed into a moment
and I saw, all at once,
who she was at every time
in her life; a therapist's chair;
a soccer ball; gently nervous
on a stairway, me asking her out;
the good and the bad all at the same time
as the rattle broke in the back of her throat
and nestled somewhere deep within me, a
sadness, a grief all of the sudden
replaced this living person
with a living cry
at 2 am rolling
over and her
gone.