Memory

Many years after myself,
I see myself awakening
In the eye of a body unknown
And knowing then, as now,
In silence, in tranquility, in loss,
The impossibility of separation.
I wonder who awakens in me,
What lives with hopes and heartaches were shed and suffered
In preparation for this one?

In quiet moments, when I am only what is left when all
That is needless ebbs, and all ambition stilled,
I am haunted, gladly, by the memory
Sprung through the guard of amnesia
From a hearth of light,
That shimmers quietly, always, behind the shroud of busyness and bother,
And recalls all my names in a call that is both
Supplication and response,
Both summons and retreat,
Both greeting and goodbye.

A long time after myself,
In spangled silence
I dream a dream of another
And freed from both the dreary narrative and narrator of one cloistered voice
I find myself not one thing to the neglect of all others
But all others in the face of one;
Both loved and scorned
Desolate and desired
Broken and blessed
Born and unborn
The wandering cloud and the firmament upon which it wanders,
– the whole earth, perhaps, and but a pebble in its skin,
And no more or less for being one or the other.

We have met before,
You and I,
In forgotten histories,
In minor accidents of time,
Our meeting not one undone by parting nor begotten of acquaintance
Ordained in stone or avowed by flesh
Ended in decay or arrested by division
But vouched by moments, singular eternities
That sequester thought, empty words, puncture time.

A long time after myself,
I see us,
In the ellipses of a dream,
In blanks between wiles,
In the shadows of our humanness.
Where memory and forgetfulness convene.