My 90-year-old grandma said
when I told her I was bereft
after my first wife called it quits.
This was almost ten years ago
and even now what comes to mind
is a nurse shark on the seabed 
slowly scoping their feeding grounds:

a sluggish but deliberate
motion to keep a vital flow
of oxygen over their gills,
never certain where they will find
either their next morsel of food
among the silt and reef debris 
that carpets the dark ocean floor

where at night they are keen to hunt,
or a partner with whom to mate
and produce a litter of pups –
only confident in the swish
of their tail to pump them forward
and the guile of their whiskered snout,
electric with sense to survive. 

So, I too, with a salve applied
by time’s passage, tried my mettle
at the gradual beckoning
of opportunity; grandma’s
advice ever present, crucial
for her decades of endurance,
words to move me out of sadness.