Grief And Awe
The carpet against my temple,
tears running sideways
across the bridge of my nose
to pool where my face meets the floor —
and the floor gives way to sea,
a deep spring risen from my own salt water,
where something swims, unhurried, free:
a whale, at rest in the grief of me,
his eye breaching the surface to watch the northern lights.
There like a tree,
I draw the ocean up through my roots.
I spray it back from every leaf.
The water that cradles the whale
quenches me, and passes clean through,
and spouts from my canopy —
his spout, my spout, rain flung back at the sky —
as though my head were a pool for the rain,
my eyes a fountain of tears.
Was Jeremiah the only other to feel like this?
Green to blue to purple to green,
the lights wave, and overwhelm
in the most beautiful way,
and the whale and I look up into the same sky.
How long can I keep this cycle —
the weeping, the heartbreak, the lament?
How, with my eyes shut tight against the flow,
do these tiny ducts keep on?
I press myself up out of fetal.
The lights. The sea. The whale. The tree.
What do they mean?
