Thursday, September 8, 2016

How She Held Him


She held him as if no one else had ever held him.
Which couldn’t have been true, he was too easily affectionate:
he’d surely been enfolded in embracing arms before.

She wore him on her breast as if to nest some large, warm,
breathing ornament: a tender brooch which lay on upon,
approached to kiss, her heart: the wounded word made sadness –

flesh – the only adequate accessory to her despair she’d ever
dared to hope could come to bless her. He had come; she was
no longer numb. They incrementally became so necessary

to each other’s need to care for, and be cared for by, each other
that they didn’t notice when a door closed in their souls:
isolating them against the rest, the test, the agony of life.

They’d closed a door on strife, they thought – never knowing
I dispassionately only had imagined them. They were a verbal
and a visual experiment which now came to an arbitrary end.

Strange to wake up and discover that you’d only ever been
a game of make-believe, pretend – that you never really were.
This first occurred to him, and last to her.



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