Some Penance

On what day did I become
so hungry for friendship
that stars shrunk slowly from
my sight?
Was it the day we met?
It might be so.
For every day hence
my stomach growled
for food that did not grow in you.

Ein Sof

Has every life apart from you
been this way?
Every breath aching with grief,
rudderless,
fallow?
How am I to bear it?
Your absence has shorn any
wing that might grow,
the bones grow dense
and lose their hollow flight.
I cannot escape my own judgement
and must find more careful hands
to cradle such a fragile heart.
I fear I slay it
with every turn.

Narrow Lonelies

What were we before this?
Before all body, before self -
inside Confluence, what were my bones?
Did lines of narrow lonelies
knot and wrap around themselves to shape me?
Can I unloop myself now to return to them?

The truth is, we are fluid in cement forms,
once moved and changed,
we're battered, re-formed, re-made.
but never those bones again.

You wait for me to see that
apart from you, in this place,
I am lonely lines no more.
And this mystery of labyrinthian knots I have become
is unerringly steering me back.

I will return to you
whole, my love,
and we will knit new days from these tests of strength.