9th December 2005, 3:55pm
When you finally
And suddenly
Left my womb
My trembling arms
My yearning gaze
I began unconsciously wrapping myself in a second skin
Spinning an invisible crystal thread around myself
I began to adapt to a new living
Slowing down my movement
My breathing
Wanting, some days, to die
Some nights, suspended in a pool of my own tears,
Affi rming that I was still alive
Your dying changed every detail of my living
I could not recognize the eyes in my mirror
Feel the familiarity of my body as it once was
Only an aching awkwardness
An amputation that still had to register.
Even my skin felt too thin.
So began the spinning
Day after day into night into day
Circling myself in a ritual of sorrow
A concentrated circling of the wound
The deep tunnel it seemed you had slipped into
I was determined to follow
And find you
Sometimes my chest grew too heavy
I inhaled smoke instead of air
A secret torture
A silent ritual of remembrance
Expressing my burning
Holding myself in the moment
Not wanting time to move me forward
Or memory to take me back
Only the manageable size of each moment
Each breath was as far as I wanted to step
Soon almost a thousand days will have passed
My spinning long since come to an end
I have been in a cocoon of my own making
Playing alive
Playing dead
Even playing
Somewhere in this shadow pocket
I have reawakened
To my stillness
To my aloneness
A gentle recognition of my separateness
From all this weeping
I have found ways to allow and suppress my tears
Words to explain why I do
Perhaps only discovering parts of myself I never knew
Before you
As this third year closes I sense a fundamental shift
A crack in my shell
Where light has begun streaming in
Warming my new skin
In my heart I am standing on a cliff
Waiting for the wind to carry me
I will not leap or dive
I will not resist when that moment of fl ight arrives
In all this waiting and wishing
Raging and aching
Accepting and denying
I have developed a comfort in the dark
A hunger for the dawn
In my bones I know
I have grown wings
March 20th, 2009 at 6:09 pm
(sigh)
I COULD HARDLY TEAR MY EYES OFF YOUR POEM