It was clouds

It was clouds we thought we held between us.
They broke and vanished and in the morning

I was alone; the clouds were unreal.
In the morning the clouds did not matter anymore;

or so I told myself, as though I could make myself forget;
as though, just by wishing, I could force condensation away.

The clouds were there but they weren’t clouds
The clouds lingered in the back of my mind.

I made a door in the wall and it closed upon me.
I made a door in the wall and I tried to crawl through.

I reached my hands into the hole in the world; as I reached
it slammed shut and the blade took my fingers off at the knuckle.

And then, with the stumps of my fingers bleeding, the way fingers cut
to the bone will do, I wanted to find my way home but the paths had changed.

It had rained and washed the earth and my footprints; I was lost.
But I made another door, my hands painting the frame red

and it stayed open for me, as if the blood was all it had wanted.
It stayed open and I walked through alone. The clouds and you

remained on the other side (you’d always been there). I passed through and as I did
I felt a breath of wind, like the faint touch of something ending.

Entrance

One night—remember?

My dream was full of people I didn’t know

—you traded places with your sadness.

I tried to care for them and then I woke up.

And when I woke, my eyes hurt with beauty.

Without the sun…you cease to appear to me

Rarified blue and greens.

I thought it saw it for it was, but I’d looked right

‘Twas Crisis—All the length had passed

past it. Just beside it.  Only along it.

bedazzled

That dull—benumbing time

You told me this sort of beauty happens every day in other places

as if, even if it did happen

my sense of walking the near edge of perfect pain

had no real meaning.

The world is so casual:  it presumes its attrition. 

I know it doesn’t.  But I don’t need to be reminded when I am inside of it.

Everything I am.

A space filled with shadows of what I perceived.

Remembering when you were here is like nailing horseshoes to hoof-prints

It is an old saw–

today let my self burn hard in its absence

I’ve stripped myself down.  I’ve dipped back into that well of pain that belongs only to me

I used to believe I was very good at being lonely.

though you have one too.

All of this is so very abstract.  Here is concrete–the seasonality of the cottonwood, the blanketing of the air and the streets with pods.  A baby gray squirrel running along the fence line.  Some stones, some earth.

Now it doesn’t seem to matter

We no longer share a language

I’m allowed to be total to this and to what was.  I’ll be inside everything and I’ll feel it.

Come sanctum  Come along strict witness.  Look.  The eye of a leaf is all.

I cannot be anything else.

the ringing will register inside my heart

a pain appropriate to my age

 

Quotes by Andrew Grace, Emily Dickinson, Ingeborg Bachmann