Pilgrimage: on Visiting Toronto’s AIDS Memorial

Please excuse my lateness

to the mourning,

my inability to read

more than a few Names

without succumbing to tears—

as if I had enough in me

for this much misery. The price, I suppose,

of learning our history,

is knowing everyone like me

is heir to a legacy of pain.

I read what I can,

hoping it’s enough

to give life and memory

to people I only ever know

as Names etched in metal,

dates book-ending

each too-short existence.

A pain whose poignancy

grows upon finding

someone born

the same year I was,

causing me to wonder

at the metaphorical bullets

dodged to separate

Name from me: a reader

spared all but

second-hand pain.

I then wonder

if this

is survivor’s guilt.

Later, I grapple

with what else to call

the special kind of exhaustion

that follows cathartic sadness.

For that matter,

I wonder at what to call

cathartic sadness

other than necessary.