after i said
what i shouldn’t have said,
after the words settled as dust
on a cluttered kitchen table,
i turned, and tumbled into a photo on the fridge
of you, me and the girl between us.
i got tangled in its grinning trinity
and couldn’t tell whether the hand cradling her back
was yours or mine—
lean, tanned fingers, or mine in shadow?
nails clean-cropped or ragged with worry?
and just when i’d almost worked out
whether it was your beginning or my ending,
the glass i was filling overflowed
and wept cold tears of surprise.
8 Responses to “photo”
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Asides
» There are no unsacred places; there are only sacred places and desecrated places. -Wendell Berry
» “The very least you can do in your life is to figure out what you hope for. And the most you can do is live inside that hope.” -Barbara Kingsolver
» It’s National Procrastination Week (who comes up with these things?), and in honor of people like me who like to celebrate NPW all year long, here’s a good article.
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This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License.
I don’t know how to say what I want to say without having it sound cloying or rah-rah-ish, except to say if I had a lighter I would flick it, and I want to know when there will be a mother’s version of a beatnik poetry cafe, where we could hear you reading this and share our own tears.
snap!
What Songbird said…
Ditto
Sadly glorious.
(o)
Beautiful and resonant. Perfect.
What Songbird said.