And after, there is only a gaping emptiness the familiar ache The desire to drown myself in soft things Fill my pockets with pebbles and all the poems my muses will never read And wade into the Lethe To the place of the first breath after momentary pain The liminal gasp between sighs The first touch after a long absence Body awakening to memory.
Welcome weary traveller, you are safe here. Dwell. Abide. The scrounging scratching crawl you call a life withdraws. Here, Float in the fingers of sunlight through glass The murmur of breath against hair The glimpse of ripples from a water-strider’s gait. Here, You are small and safe You suffer no harm nor cause it Your existence has curled in on itself And blooms with the sunrise. Here, Your presence is a fleck on a robin’s egg The bruise of teeth on a petal An eyelash in sand Lost, lingering, and longing.
The Lethe plucks the pebbles and poems into the current Your likeness billows with ink in the wake Adrift, I clutch at your fading hand But rising, find I do not know this face Left only with a flicker Of a stranger’s arms around my waist.