,” I say, tilting my head
adjusting my earring,
you holding my coat and scarf
as if you are my servant,
laughing with eased waists,
as if we are sisters.
At the front desk,
you say, “go figure,” shrugging,
I nod, pay, tip, sun streaming,
warming everything it lights,
you disappear into the back office,
me into the street.
The forest floor crackles,
catching dribbles from above.
A breeze shifts, fresh spray
showers the twigs and dried leaves.
I can smell that rain and those damp,
quieting mornings, cool moss under my feet.
The blue jay’s harsh, long cawk,
intrusive. Why did they not swoop down on us?
The breeze builds through high branches,
far overhead, swirling in a crisscross,
picking up the roar from the lake. Closing
your eyes, you cannot separate waves
capsizing from branches wrenching overhead.
They groan. As you stand motionless, each
blade of grass still, random drips
from low growth, a soft damp, the trees
swoop around you in a kind of inversion,
where you effuse the sacred silence
and the cathedral rushes with
all disheveled wildness, wonder.
The waiter doubts me, a worn heap
retreating into simplicity and slight
self-abnegation. I prepare myself to fold
into the priestly realm of sleep.
Do I look like a stewardess tonight,
drinking my white wine and sipping
my French onion soup (in this bar, at this
time of night, overstating the feminine)?
But I am not twenty-five, not laughing
in a tangle of blondes, not hoping
for the pilots to join us, not waited on
by a slightly younger blonde,
bewildered with awe and disdain.
A deeper, more secure, apprehension surfaces.
I push its worldly shape to a distance,
allow it to linger, protect me from corruption.
Skies hang today like my gray-brown
bed sheet from when I knew you,
discolored by countless nights
of filthy feet and scraped knees
from spud and ding dong ditch
and ghosts in the graveyard,
never washing white.
How long it takes to see
the nonwhite on the sheet
and then longer still to decide
whether to care —
whether to try
one more time to wash it clean,
or let it stand as another
of the endless monuments to defeat.
My memory of you is pure,
whiter than that sheet
when first pulled from the package,
its creases’ first ever unfolding.
It still gleams in a slow ember,
slow enough to remain steadfast,
waiting to be noticed, recollected,
its soft brilliance drawing my eyes
to something wondrous, elemental:
Your youth, your joy, your possibilities;
your shoulders sloughing off the dingy
residue that seemed to drag all of us
back to our choiceless beginning;
your simple truth;
how windows flew open
when you came around, breezes flowing through
random and wild.
Is it possible you existed that way
and refashioned all the world
to exist that way? Is it possible
that you held me on your knee
singing and glistening?
Is it possible that your light opened me
and dispersed the shadow of shadows,
leaving me with something unnamable,
forever new, yet so hidden
that it surprised me once again
as I woke this morning?
I wonder where you are
and if you still gleam in the same way,
or if you have chosen to put that ember down
to face our uncomfortable, perpetual grime.
Would I dare glisten?
My gift to you is that I stand still,
regardless of how the world flips and turns,
regardless of how rapidly the marbles
slide from this side to that.
I am here, in this chair, in this room,
unmoved.
My gift to you is that I am your mirror
and the farther you pull away from me,
the clearer you and everything around you becomes.
Then you know you are far away,
and, perhaps then, you know how to come back.
In me, you gather yourself, your sensations,
and I sit motionless.
My gift to you is that I contain everything
and all there is on earth and in your mind,
all commotions, chaos, love, relief, incoherence.
I contain it and preserve it in its original form,
uncatalogued, uncleaned, raw, for your own embrace.
It is here, inside me, for you,
as I sit here, waiting.
My gift to you is that I am empty,
and that no matter how you try to overstuff me
with your naive ambitions and unbidden
nightmares, I will have room for more.
You never have to go anywhere else,
or be anything else, or make anything else.
It is complete, here, in me,
stubborn and still.
———————————-
This poem was inspired by Victoria Slotto’s Writers’ Fourth Wednesday ’Got change?’ prompt (The Bardo Group, http://intothebardo.wordpress.com/2014/09/24/got-change-writers-fourth-wednesday/). Victoria asks poets to write about how they make change for good in the world. My starting point was Hannah Arendt’s book Men in Dark Times which explores the role of the philosopher when society falls apart.
Poems from in between 