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Leaving


ISSUE:  Winter 1993

Were there such an end as destination
I could say that I was leaving,
could imagine friends gathered on the street below,
cheering maybe, waving maps tied to sticks.
But there isn’t. There is only expansion and contraction,
like infinity, or a dime on the sidewalk,
like a letter I found in a corner of the empty room
I am moving out of, a letter I didn’t mail
that begins, “Dear S. — Guilt is the wound that never
  stops healing;
at times I want to look outside and see my daughter
standing beneath the ash tree and the stars,
a sparkler hissing blue and yellow in her two hands,
but the window is missing, lost,
lying in a field where someone passing

could look down into it and see the faces
rising up through the earth
and sinking back. . . .” A tiny, well-formed cloud
hovers in the space between my eye and the page.
I imagine I have inhaled the sky,
that I grow larger. I imagine that one day
I may grow large enough to fill my body.

 

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