An Elegant Branch
A dark, slender branch
elegantly dressed in snow
reaches for the sun.
Posts tagged ‘poetry’
Mar 6
2 Comments
Living with a writer.
This is what it can be like when you live with a writer. I sent this text message to my husband a couple of days ago. I’m a shameless gusher, embarrassed, but shameless.
Text Message to My Husband
I love you.
Stating it risks redundancy,
but you who have loved me
through all the rough, raw places;
through hours of insanity
for the blessing of a moment
with sweetness and clarity;
you, who made me believe
I was lovable by staying;
by taking my hand,
even as I pushed yours away,
pretending indifference,
as my heart hemorrhaged fear,
my soul quaking
with the knowledge
that this might finally be the hurt
that turned you away from me
forever.
Even then, brave lover,
you took a chance that it was all an act,
that if you could remain,
the husk would fall away,
revealing tender kernels, plump and sweet
with the juice of innocent yearning.
Holding the very instrument of your pain
tightly against you,
intuitively, you knew
that if you could withstand the agony,
I would melt and meld with you,
and we would rush, warm and wild
through this craggy life
we were thrust into,
that we still have so much of
to live through together.
You, my lover and most steadfast of friends,
are oxygen to the burning embers of my being.
You fill my mind to overflowing
with all the ways to speak those words,
I love you.
Oct 8
Clinical Hands
Clinical hands
The first hands to touch me
were clinical hands,
as you laid in twilight sleep, mother
drugged against your wishes
by a doctor who “knew better” than you did
what was good for you and your newborn daughter.
Clinical hands passed me
to other clinical hands
latex against my exposed
and innocent skin.
The only child of five
not laid upon her mother’s warm, waiting breasts
Could that be the explanation
for the inexplicable fear of abandonment
that has paralyzed me most of my life?
A fear that compelled me to crawl on my hands and knees
Until I could prop my chin at your feet, willing my gaze to awaken you
without rousing the jealous man who lay beside you?
When I was lucky, your eyes would flutter open
your tender gaze would find me,
and you would open your arms
like the gates of golden heaven
and the grip of those cold, clinical hands on my heart
would be torn loose, banished by the warmth of your body.
We cannot know now
if four decades ago that doctor’s arrogance
disrupted the earliest, wordless bond
of mother and child.
Perhaps it has nothing to do with the consuming emptiness
that has haunted me all of my life.
Maybe it is only a result
of your decision to share that story
over and over again as I grew-up
that created the memories of being taken
from a warm, safe haven of love
to a place of harsh, sterile separation, barren of life.
The stories we tell our children
have a power unimaginable
in the adult world, of logic and common sense.
I cannot blame you mother
for sharing a memory that was painful for you.
I just wish that I could go back and change it, for us both.
