Recommended Read

Splittings

1.
My body opens over San Francisco like the day –
light raining down each pore crying the change of light
I am not with her  
I have been waking off and on
all night to that pain  
not simply absence but
the presence of the past
destructive to living here and now     
Yet if I could instruct myself,
if we could learn to learn from pain
even as it grasps us     
if the mind, the mind that lives
in this body could refuse to let itself be crushed in that grasp
it would loosen     
Pain would have to stand off from me and listen    
its dark breath still on me
but the mind could begin to speak to pain
and pain would have to answer:
We are older now
we have met before     these are my hands before your eyes
my figure blotting out      
all that is not mine
I am the pain of division      
creator of divisions
it is I who blot your lover from you
and not the time-zones or the miles
It is not separation calls me forth      
but I who am separation      
And remember
I have no existence      apart from you

2.
I believe I am choosing something now
not to suffer uselessly yet still to feel
Does the infant memorize the body of the mother
and create her in absence?    
or simply cry
primordial loneliness?     
does the bed of the stream
once diverted      mourning       remember the wetness?
But we, we live so much in these
configurations of the past    
I choose to separate her from my past we have not shared
I choose not to suffer uselessly
to detect primordial pain as it stalks toward me
flashing its bleak torch in my eyes blotting out
her particular being the details of her love
I will not be divided from her or from myself
by myths of separation
while her mind and body in Manhattan are more with me
than the smell of eucalyptus coolly burning on these hills

3.
The world tells me I am its creature
I am raked by eyes brushed by hands
I want to crawl into her for refuge     lay my head
in the space     between her breast and shoulder
abnegating power for love
as women have done or hiding
from power in her love like a man
I refuse these givens     
the splitting between love and action   
I am choosing
not to suffer uselessly      
and not to use her 
I choose to love this time      
for once
with all my intelligence.

Read this collection because the words will haunt you. This book is stunning.