Repetition Compulsion
And why not?
Why shouldn’t I seek
the likeness of God? Of Him
who teaches love is knowing
something is born in us again.
Baptised into this I who steers a fate
beyond navigating. The relics of lives
I bear anew in the name I am given.
I am the story told many times over.
I am someone in someone else’s
body of someone else. When I long
it is my mother’s own heft of desire
burning through an afternoon’s
melancholy, my father lost in the swirl
of radiance of who they were, shadows
swelling inside her soon to be
the heirs of their fragments.
In the binds of tenderness, we reach.
Yet we are not who we touch.
In the glimpse of mirror we are wedded to
the past restores in the remnants
of the child we forget. Her soft flesh
is given to the marvels of wound—
the cuts that heal many times over
into scars nurtured beyond notice
by the voice chasing after her name
as she runs breathless
at the instance of embrace.
A Kind of Remembering
Neuroscience insists it lies
fragile beneath the white arc
where a clump of muscles
flex in dark grace of memory
until faces fuse with their names again,
syllables of shape and silhouette.
A precise time heals
wound into another presence—
the phantom of a limb. The mind
haunting the flesh as when the arm
reaches for what was once there,
or of what it can remember
of itself ensnared now
by absence.
This cold science probes
the body’s vastness to master
where thought and gestures collide
as sinews trail for hints buried
into neural tracks, those we forget
to trust in the daily failings
of our inattention
Then discover
when space and emptiness conspire
in the aftermath of love or loss
or when someone simply leaves,
and we awaken to an elsewhere
that inhabits us as well.