We Shape Each Other To Be Human
We had dozens of different words for the way snow falls,
floats, descends, glides, blows, for the way clouds move,
the way ice floats, the way boats sail; but not that word.
Not yet. And so I don’t remember “flying.”
I remember falling upward through the golden light.
Something I could not locate anywhere,
some part of my soul, hurt
with a keen, desolate, ceaseless pain.
I was afraid of myself: of my tears, my rage,
my sickness, my clumsy body. It did not feel like my body,
like me. It felt like something else, an ill-fitting garment,
a smelly, heavy overcoat that belonged to some other person,
some dead person. It wasn’t mine, it wasn’t me.
Praise then Darkness,
and then suddenly the startling silvery rush of a single voice
running across the weaving, against the current,
and sinking into it and vanishing, and rising out of it again.
Trying to ignore the heat and cold,
the fire and ice in my body,
And failing into harmony
till dawn came and I could go sing again.
Here it’s always Year One.
On New Year’s Day, the Year One becomes one-ago,
one-to-come becomes One, and so on.
It is that way, that timeless world, that world around the corner…
Yet as I write I see how also nothing changes,
that it is truly the Year One always,
for each child that comes of age, each lover who falls in love.
The immense house was very quiet.
Its peace sank into me.
Again I felt that strangeness in my soul, but it was not pain now;
it was a desolation like the air at evening,
like the peaks seen far in the west in the clarity of winter.
It was immense enlargement.
And falling upward,
Upward through the golden light,
I was in love forever for all time all my life to eternity with