I am one of the lucky ones II

Last night I watched you sleeping,
your body emptied of emotion, lost
in the tangle of sheets and pillows and
dreams and memories. We had quarrelled,

my words a sad and weary refrain
that no longer had any feeling or meaning
when I spoke them: soap bubbles with no substance,
no strength to soothe or charm or forgive.

Asleep, your body breathed beauty,
but the world you lived in seemed lost to me.
I could not enter your dreams, your secret
mysteries, even if I emptied myself.

I could not know your touch nor feel
your distant heart. In that midnight stillness
I tried to penetrate your silence, to remember
once more the path to your luminous core

that keeps me whole. But your skin,
your breath, your body stayed dark and silent,
the air around you dense with denial,
forbidding to me, an exile from you,

unable to enter and unwilling to depart
in loss. I do not know if daylight will bring
direction, or if it will sear the wounds of strangeness
with numbness. I do not know which is better.

But now, next to you, I know that
night brings sleep. I know that night brings
mystery. And I know that I want you
to hold me, to untangle the way

and to smooth out the crumples of
my fallen life, and to allow your grace
to fill my emptied whole.
I am one of the lucky ones because of you.

18 December 2006