I


March 95

Your two smiles --
one soft
(wisps of sweet smoke at the corners of your mouth
as you stare at me, a galaxy of emotion opaque in your eyes);
the other, all joy and teeth and wrinkled nose.
Mirth squeezes your eyes shut.

II
4/14/95
I have tried to keep you out,
clinging to my pain instead,
my cherished thing, my teddy bear
crowned with thorns.

Your passion burns away
the sickness in my heart and soul.

I hear the sound of your wings unfolding.
Though afraid, you spring from your crag of loneliness and soar.
Your new plumes flash like silver in the spring sun.
My wings, not new like yours,
have gaps where feathers have been ripped away.
But still I soar beside you.
Our wing tips touch.


III

Note the prayer’s well-chosen words:
Lead us not into temptation.
Not, “Make us strong, help us resist.”
We are and must be weak. Tempted we fall.

We scoff, we reek of scorn as neighbors feed the cravings we don't share.
We sit smug
until the day we find the thing (forbidden thing)
that seems to soothe the open wound,
the wound that longs for the lover's touch,
the very touch that keeps the wound so red and new.

How do I learn to know a different touch, a different wound,
the wound Juan knew,
the soft pierced hand of God that wounds
so gently in the deepest center of the soul?

My pride today is soot and dirty feathers in my mouth.
I thought my love, my goodness were enough,
enough for me, enough for the one I loved.
They were not.
They were worse than less than enough.
They were nothing.
Tonight I know that I am nothing too.

I wait, I listen, I look for the secret stair that leads
to the beloved,
for the light that guides, that shows the way.
But my house perhaps is never still enough.
The noise of worry and desire drowns out the knocking of the gentle bleeding
hand.

The only hand I feel is yours,
bleeding too.

Can the heat from your soft fingers
cauterize my wound,
or will I only bleed afresh
and leave your tender heart deformed?

IV
5/12/99

Today a wound is opened, a wound we find new joy in. Patricia emerges,
ghastly blue, bathed in blood,
into a world I understand as well as she does.
Not at all.

The quiet solitude we shared has passed away.
We bury it in joy
As this new being comes
To get her share of all we are.

All that was will spin itself into all that must be.
Thirty years ago a junkie played a saxophone.
His music touched us, made us touch each other.
And now Patricia.

I walk out of the operating room, paper hairnet on my head.
People in green are walking with me, but I can’t see them.
I only see the baby in my arms, and then, my parents,
standing stunned as I am, sharing a wordless moment...
A sense of helplessness.
A sense of stepping slowly but defiantly into a pitch-dark space, the
future.

 
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