I'm trying to read the poetry and fiction in The New Yorker these days, along with their tremendous non-fiction articles.

I love this poem.

[Note: I changed the gender-specific pronouns as it spoke to me better this way.]

Grief
by Matthew Dickman

When grief comes to you as a purple gorilla
you must count yourself lucky.
You must offer him what’s left
of your dinner, the book you were trying to finish
you must put aside,
and make him a place to sit at the foot of your bed,
his eyes moving from the clock
to the television and back again.
I am not afraid. He has been here before
and now I can recognize his gait
as he approaches the house.
Some nights, when I know he’s coming,
I unlock the door, lie down on my back,
and count his steps
from the street to the porch.
Tonight he brings a pencil and a ream of paper,
tells me to write down
everyone I have ever known,
and we separate them between the living and the dead
so he can pick each name at random.
I play his favorite Willie Nelson album
because he misses Texas
but I don’t ask why.
He hums a little,
the way my brother does when he gardens.
We sit for an hour
while he tells me how unreasonable I’ve been,
crying in the checkout line,
refusing to eat, refusing to shower,
all the smoking and all the drinking.
Eventually he puts one of his heavy
purple arms around me, leans
his head against mine,
and all of a sudden things are feeling romantic.
So I tell him,
things are feeling romantic.
He pulls another name, this time
from the dead,
and turns to me in that way that parents do
so you feel embarrassed or ashamed of something.
Romantic? he says,
reading the name out loud, slowly,
so I am aware of each syllable, each vowel
wrapping around the bones like new muscle,
the sound of that person’s body
and how reckless it is,
how careless that her name is in one pile and not the other.