How It Started. How It’s Going.
by Caryn Mirriam-Goldberg, Ph.D.
We were so much older then in our surety,
our arms and legs lean and hungry,
our minds filling triple-speed with bright chirps,
skipped tracks between daring and knowing better,
each touch tentative as a spider web right before
a hurricane, every conversation an egg of hope
we were careful not to crack by naming what we were
the next morning over blueberry pancakes.
We fit together in a three-dimensional puzzle,
a ball or oval or something else round, wanting
to seal itself with sex and talk, the more, the better.
When I woke from a nightmare of need,
I wrapped myself tighter around you: a prayer
for something that might last, that might become
a third animal made of both of us holding on.
That was over 40 years ago, so far across
the ocean of nights that’s hard to imagine
those leggy kids hunting in the dark.
Now it’s still for a moment, but we know
the difference: how rare when the air isn’t rushing
in on its spinning heels to knock over everything.
We’ve passed our newborns, now older
than we were then, to each other
in the yellow light of the birthing center
We’ve joked about rigor mortis while trying
to dress our newly-dead friend in his Sufi robe.
We’ve washed and miswashed thousands of dishes
and tee shirts, complaining or comparing
because we were exhausted. We’ve driven through
hail storms and hallucinations, the worst fights
fecund as an Ozark forest in July. You were wrong
so often, me too, and mostly it didn’t matter.
“Hey,” you say in the hallway or I say on the phone.
“It’s you,” we answer in whatever language is
the parlance of the moment.
our arms and legs lean and hungry,
our minds filling triple-speed with bright chirps,
skipped tracks between daring and knowing better,
each touch tentative as a spider web right before
a hurricane, every conversation an egg of hope
we were careful not to crack by naming what we were
the next morning over blueberry pancakes.
We fit together in a three-dimensional puzzle,
a ball or oval or something else round, wanting
to seal itself with sex and talk, the more, the better.
When I woke from a nightmare of need,
I wrapped myself tighter around you: a prayer
for something that might last, that might become
a third animal made of both of us holding on.
That was over 40 years ago, so far across
the ocean of nights that’s hard to imagine
those leggy kids hunting in the dark.
Now it’s still for a moment, but we know
the difference: how rare when the air isn’t rushing
in on its spinning heels to knock over everything.
We’ve passed our newborns, now older
than we were then, to each other
in the yellow light of the birthing center
We’ve joked about rigor mortis while trying
to dress our newly-dead friend in his Sufi robe.
We’ve washed and miswashed thousands of dishes
and tee shirts, complaining or comparing
because we were exhausted. We’ve driven through
hail storms and hallucinations, the worst fights
fecund as an Ozark forest in July. You were wrong
so often, me too, and mostly it didn’t matter.
“Hey,” you say in the hallway or I say on the phone.
“It’s you,” we answer in whatever language is
the parlance of the moment.
Caryn Mirriam-Goldberg, Ph.D., the 2009-13 Kansas Poet Laureate is the author of 24 books, including How Time Moves: New & Selected Poems; Miriam's Well, a novel; and The Sky Begins At Your Feet: A Memoir on Cancer, Community, and Coming Home to the Body. Founder of Transformative Language Arts, she offers writing workshops, coaching, and collaborative projects. Her poetry has been widely published, including in Terrain, Half and One, Poets & Writers, Negative Capability, Mockingheart Review, Two Rivers, The New Territory, Louisville Review, New Letters, and dozens of other journals.
http://carynmirriamgoldberg.com
http://carynmirriamgoldberg.com