The Note

Knowing alights in her eyes, and I understand

the shared disillusion, hung hollow as a cheap

backdrop from rotting ropes, has fallen

in flutters, waves, til crumpled beneath a

flicker of dying light on a sagging stage.

I want to catch her hand.

Make her also belong to the shared space of

familiar understanding where hatred and excitement

and envy and oh so desperate needing puddle

out loud on a lined paper that can lift and

wake one to completeness.

But the act crumples just as it takes flight,

folds neatly, then anxiously inward until it becomes a stabilizer

in the bottom-of-your-bag mulch.

And in the unsaid, the untransferred – hope

as well as fear, insecurity, love –

the grool that propelled our young minds

forward and unformed into a horizon we had

no language to navigate.

Thrust too soon, before our ripeness, without borders or

penalty. And so we explore, break, devour fully formed things

to regurgitate a new delectable milk of ideas.

And in the endlessness of our unknowing, the eons til our awakening,

I cannot reach her.

What chance did a caught hand have?

A searching into the shared wholeness that ripped us open,

made something new and unrecognizable behind the face I know well?

Instead – a slip into the shadow, sick and unfolded

in all the ways that made her brighter.

I originally wrote this piece to submit to a competition where the rules required the writer to use the words: belong, hollow, wake, lift, puddle, horizon, beneath, milk, flicker, break. Using the required words both enriched the poem and at times shifted what I was intending to say. I missed the deadline, but the piece became important in processing something that I haven't been able to to fully understand or grasp without this poem.