10-Guilty for the Rain

One can feel guilty for anything,

really.

Guilty for the rain,

for the oxygen we breathe,

for the light that doesn’t change,

for the milk that turns sour.

Your guilt was quiet but not innocent.

I could feel it creep up the stairs,

grab you by the throat,

trip you till you couldn’t stand.

You’d relent in the name of duty,

eldest born,

head on shoulders,

wiser than his years,                                               

the always practical, rational, you.

It thwarted the lover

with his distracted violin,

author of dictionaries,  

teacher of utopias,

 the little boy who walked in his sleep.

“El enfermo”, she called you

over and over

thirty years later.

Those words left wounds deeper

than the scalpels that tore through your

withered leg.

How they resounded in every

            thump

                        of your limp

                                                on the pavement.

So many lives later,

your guilt comes to taunt me

in her motionless orbit,

graceless neglect strangling

my first and last love.  

Contagious, corrosive, it nests in me

until now, I too, am a cripple of guilt

for you,

for her,

for the rain.