“Probably one of the most private things in the world is an egg before it is broken.” ～M. F. K. Fisher
+
(For my husband, whose lullaby is my breathing every night.)
All the secrets I do not share,
and all the secrets I tell no one;
all the secrets absent in my poems,
and all the secrets I do not sing, even in the silent song
of solitude permeating my veins
like the warmth and gentle scent of your amber,
these secrets are buried deep inside, within
the dreams of your belly.
They melt, and are reborn.
They grow wings, and they fly.
In the blueness of your eyes
is the light of a deep ocean that has lived
a thousand years, a thousand years of
meditative loneliness. In your hair, the golden amber grows
into a transparent flower, fragrance of the night.
The amber flower that connects your mind
with your heart.
One day you discovered a pale feather
of an anonymous bird, colour of a pale rose.
A rare feather,
exquisite and fragile, shining under
an old tree of glittering green leaves.
It was nighttime, but the sun was out.
Your one tender kiss awoke the feather, and turned it
into the bird she once was, in a past life she had already forgotten.
The rare and exquisite and fragile bird.
And she has lived with your heart, in your heart, ever since.
Your surrender to nothingness is expansive, and
the warmest embrace there ever is, ever will be.
Your refined detachment of the closest, dearest attachment of tenderness
It gives meaning to what seems to be void of meanings at all,
resembling a delicately and beautifully
cracked porcelain vase,
its slender neck holding all the secrets which are not remembered.
The unbreaking of a broken egg, in the most perfect shade
of pearlescent ivory, with
not even the faintest lines on a rainbow-hued seashell.
I realise in this moment we are regal.
We are angels.
Your elegance is the reddest of all the red peonies
blooming between our bodies and souls.
Us.
You say I can neither understand nor imagine. I close
my eyes and think of
the most beautiful desert moon, or the saddest
love poem, or our daughter
in your arms, in the farthest and nearest yesterday
of our tomorrow.
You spoke to my philosophy professor as if
he was one of your oldest friends.
You talked about Heidegger, and game theory,
and all the dilemmas of life, in a beautiful manner which transcended them all,
as if they were lines from an old poem you had written long ago.
You say the whole life is in The Little Prince, and that you
cannot admire someone who is not an acharya,
however brilliant his thoughts,
however great his legacy.
I look at this perfect man before me, with his
bluest blue eyes and think to myself, “I married
the one rare acharya I know.”
I am your heart, as you are my poetry,
mirror of my aloneness
the soundlessness of my melodies,
the attachment of my detachment,
the meaningfulness of my meaninglessness,
the nothingness of my very own self,
my undefined/undefinable otherness.
You taught me I am myself and I am enough,
in need of no more, like Cocteau's Trinity
that binds my heart in the truest way it longs to be bound.
And so I write, different from how I have ever written poetry,
in the state of being and the state of breathing,
without striving and crafting,
without effort,
as if I was writing
for the very first and the very last time.
～June 2012
