"If you bring forth what is within you, what you bring forth will save you. If you do not bring forth what is within you, what you do not bring forth will destroy you."-Gospel of Thomas
II
Did the two of you, sisters, plan this long ago when you were running away from the pretty boys who dressed their hair and teeth and shirts in the gold of the Coast’s sun all the while hiding their ravenous hearts. Did the two of you, plan this long ago when you heard your mother weeping for her lost sister in Taichung, and spent the day hiding her pain in the smile of her red that lit up a room and destroyed men’s carnivorous hearts. Did the two of you plan this long ago when you watched your father, after his dance of dampened morning tennis, walk out into the sea like Berryman’s poor Henry, you his two dream songs, when for a moment, he began to disappear beneath the waves and the elbows of light and your gulped and your stalwart hearts weakened as you thought he would never return to you again. Willow sky, shark undertow, the dorsal dividing your lives, stilled and pulling. His rowing and stretching and breach into the sky-dark air.
His emergence. How could he not?
Did the two you know that you would spin this magical world of stories, pain and life from the blood, spit and incandescence of your heads, hearts and bodies: a rolled-down window of grief born star-struck from the life arriving and stretching inside a boy, golden in his hour as his life clocked and shadowed and counted out love. How both of your dreams were rent ripe for the separation of one another.
Two who harnessed the kingdom of language and the sinewy muscle of their fears and worked them into image, and book, stamped and glued from lives marked ostensibly of privilege and wealth, yet name the price tag and debt of suffering, those books are more difficult to mark up and away
and all the iconic breathing, longtime and sandtag, imagined upon each other long past the spider webs terrifying the trees and the bubbled garage parks and the swans dead along the banks of backyard grass, strangled by moss and glade and desire.
I know for I have seen all from afar.
I hear the patter of the dark approaching.
Lace up dear, lace up
