Monday, November 5, 2012

disembodied

disembodied


I am disembodied,
free to travel in space or time.

I come to you
without coming to you.
There, I take your hand
without taking your hand.
I ask you to remember
without asking you to remember:


We met as we often did
after long separations
and at intersections of us.

You asked if we could not sit in a car
so you could hug me standing, saying,
“I couldn’t wait to do this.”

I always cherished being near you,
but I can admit this now I think:
I failed to see how frazzled you were.

I failed to see, to acknowledge
how hard you tried to hold onto us
and how that frayed the edges of you.

I ask you if these failures
killed the possibility of us,
or if you simply grew out of me,
out of us—my greatest fear.


I found the movie again—
the one I’d stopped watching
in the middle the night before.

I never intended to watch
this movie that seemed trite
but compelled me to watch.

And it was there in this film
I saw flashes of myself,
flashes I didn’t want to see.

And then the predictable:

she kissed him suddenly
raised on her toes, eyes closed.

She pulled away softly and slowly,
still on her toes, her chin turned up,
her eyes closed against this thing, smiling.

These things matter, these givings,
these precious moments lingering
in the space between us, disembodied.


I am disembodied
and I raise my hands that are not hands
to feel the vibrations of the universe,

to reach out to reclaim the moment
your heels returned to the pavement
that day you raised on your toes

to hug me, to kiss me, and to let me know
that all of this was everything to you—
if only I had known how to know then.

I am disembodied,
free to travel in space or time.

I return to the day I handed you
a Milan Kundera novel.
I hold the book firmly
as you take it in your hands,
And I look straight into your eyes
looking back into mine to say:

“I am there now and always
without being there now and always.”

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