My Portrait Of You
.
.
.
My Portrait Of You
“My daughter partners me in dance,
we share this life as time demands.
—Yet time expands. —It births a child,
the herald of my own exile,
a daughter’s daughter with eyes beguiled
by visions I shall never see,
by a future where I will not be.
Her birth begets full vacancy,
the haunting queerness of not-here-ness.”
...................................“But you’ve always thrived on absence, fearless.
...................................We’ve always found in distance, nearness.
...................................You never stayed for long. You’d wave
...................................from the precipice of every grave
...................................you hurtled through—. The gifts you gave,
...................................steadfast in their evanescence.
...................................You always vanish! Your fleeting presence
...................................susceptible to circumstances,
...................................reverberant, an echo’s echo.”
“It’s the heart of me you know.
And it’s the heart of me that shows
my nothingness to me—through her,
her life a light that shines a hole
into the emptied chamber of my soul,
her birth another death I'm dying,
another skin I’m sloughing—trying
to breathe death in by clarifying
further depths—becoming ghost.”
...................................“My portrait of you? — : here-and-lost,
...................................now-and-gone, frontier-crossed
...................................by the muscle-of-a-backward-glance.
...................................Disembodied, still, we dance,
...................................unpartnered by the realm of chance,
...................................passing points of light who’ve dared
...................................to cross the cavern that we’ll share
...................................immeasurably — an un-selfed pair—
...................................our hymn a hole through which we steer.”
.
.
.
|