As the earth turned her flesh to fire, our lungs started to drown. Isn’t this the great irony, fire and water at opposite ends of the room, teasing each other of the time they once danced as lovers? I have been told to keep my body and breath steps away from any other and it is in this seclusion that I dream the most deeply about passion and what it is to feel another’s hand rest on my lower back. Is all love found in this liminal space of desire and fear? That tension is what compels us to continue to create life. In my dreams, you touch me and your fingers are matches, but my stomach is an ocean. We meet at the most beautiful of spaces. Somehow, ivy grows from our feet. We wrap ourselves around the bedposts, cover corners of the room, shadows disappear as smoke, and we never wonder what happened outside the windows while fire and water threaten to embrace, once again. ____
We put those that we cherished in carved wood or porcelain. It makes me want to escape, to pretend this all, life and love and death, were only strange prequel to the real start, a slow dream, the kind you regret to wake from. The sky lit on fire again tonight, but it did not mean you would come home. If the house were an ocean, you were a ship, and now I am left to the lacking mercy of the wind and sea, I’ll sleep and sleep, imagine you free. ___
It seems as though the cicadas only wept during the sunlight until one night, as summer found his end in the cessation of fire. I felt the cool of fall hinting at her arrival, a soft romance in the blue hours of morning or a gust slithering through the open window. This cry was not like that of the screech owl nesting in the tree next to my bedroom window, a wail that took its’ nails against your bones. No, the cicada’s cry was one of desire, a hum so low that only the skin on the back of your neck can sense it. Isn’t this what we all hope for, a desire so primal, that we wish to molt our skin to find another body? Yet in the transient process of shedding to finding, those few moments hanging in the air before a storm, is where all the damage will be done, the vulnerable heart without a refuge. ___
We begin to prepare for the dead, their bodies and the questions while the air is filled with fumes of loss. I’ll organize the containers, in flames or ice. You know this is when we all decide on a final rest for the bones that helped Spirit move through time on earth. Each delicate joint is tired from running or pivoting. Those that looked into my eyes, deeply during love, will turn away from my loss, struggling to witness my cooling skin. We try to decide the language we will organize for the children: books we will share and ancients’ songs on the return to nonmaterial. The preparation is all self, missing final moments when their breath pulses in and out the ether, those last hours when they are a part of the collective rather than the eternal, returning home after the long, long journey. ___
You will feel alone for a long time. You will isolate your body in the way your mind urges. Life will seem at a standstill, moments slowly slipping like honey from a spoon. You will tell yourself that this will be forever, that this emptiness has taken over your body and you are now just a host for eternal longing. Until, one morning you will wake with the first hint of the sun out of her sleep, instinctively. You will be aligned with a time you had forgotten. Your skin will call your bones to move to the window, burst it open, and let in all the light you had denied existed. Your lungs will cry out to the blue line between the ocean and horizon that you are alive, truly alive and here. It will be an ancient language, one of the beings that came long before you, one that can only be known after transitions. As the sun reaches her peak above the clouds, your laughter will peel open bright as a blood orange, filling silence with the same curiosity of your most celebrated childhood. It is only then that you will know that grief finally found a room in which to rest, inside of you, and that you will carry the lost with you for the rest of your days in this unique body, until finally another great love will start to carry you.
POET BIO:
I currently live, write, and teach in El Paso, Texas. I lecture in the English Department and Honors College at Texas State University. I have work published or forthcoming in Construction, Columbia Poetry Review, The Open Bar at Tin House, The Learned Pig, etc.