ManicDDaily

Circle

Dear Mother,
I realize now
there was a miscommunication.

We were like children playing “telephone”–
sitting in a circle on the floor, mis-whispering
hand-cupped messages.

So, when you said, or at least meant,
“you are my everything,”
I heard, “you must be everything.”
And when you said, at least meant, “there is nothing
more important,”
I heard, “otherwise, you’re nothing important–”

I don’t know how the wires got crossed.
Maybe you’d misheard the messages yourself–
we were not the only ones
in that circle–

But the words of a song learned wrong
soon belong to the tunes we sing, fit our musics
like a glove.

So, what’s to be done, love?

What comes to mind
is simply kindness–
a kindness that is everything
yet gives itself, too, to nothing important.

It feels–the receiving
of this kindness–like bared hands cupping
one another–
like the breath of palm upon knuckle,
the caress of air’s
tissues–

It feels–the giving
of this kindness–like these hands cupping
a heart
as if it were an infant animal, baby chick,
some ball of warmth whose murmured messages
we think we well understand.

But it’s hard to cup one’s own heart, to reach
inside the cage of one’s formed ribs, twist elbows
against their grooves;
fearsome to stretch fingers
into that deep,
to find the aching beat one can’t see but must just feel for

when we sometimes seem to feel it everywhere,
even in the boards I pace as I call you, now from a cell phone,
as if the heart could be cut and sanded,
made into planks that we might sit upon, you and me,
holding us upright, as back and forth
we whisper, try too, to listen.

***************************************

Here’s a poem for Real Toads Open Link night. And also for Kerry O’Connor’s fortuitous prompt on dichotomy.