Needle

TheFeatheredSleep

Learned early

How to let go

Always saying goodbye

Short twitches of time

I learned

Through closing french windows

Palid light playing in empty spaces

Where dust looks like a jewel and distance

Can be swept up with the debris clamoring to get there

Doing nothing honors nothing

So we packed our memories in minced words

The river poorly stretching like colourless yawn

You inhabited the past before a future existed

Leaving, the ambelical chord severed in a neat recoil

And I learned, as in your turn you learned and in your mother’s turn she knew

Not to expect the people who should love you, to stay

I am a string of colored glass about memories neck

And as the rocket becomes totem in rain swollen skies

I wish myself an astronaut

To propel from tierra and leave behind legacies

Of loss

On a hot night, my hand sweats the melting ice tonguing glass

And in our imagination
we are needed

Vouched for by a tight stitched safety net spread over jagged edges

I was told I said thank you and sorry too much

So I quit saying both

Though it was only a habit bourne from

Being from people who never apologized.

…

Letting go is the most familiar feeling I possess

I turn to it like a lined book and scribble my fears in its grimy recesses

And the hairbrush and night light you left behind

Burns out and stays as cold as walking around the house without socks

Clings and repels

Calling in sick

Staying absent there is more oxygen

Catch me if you can says the long distance runner

We who stop and start our watches, so many times

Much used joints ache prematurely

And the thrum of rain is a constant

Thread through memory books

Poised as young dancers

Will crane to catch

Every elongation of unfolding sound

It was what bonded us

Immediate, like transferred ink

Can’t be licked off

The intimate knowing of good-byes and loss

Its reverberation in unused spare rooms

Pacing emptiness and her poor assuage

Until it was our turn

To raise the knife and bring our uncertainty

Puncture through fine quill of transparency

Hurt has that synonym

A song playing on repeat

Forever tasked to jumping her needle

Advertisement

16 thoughts on “Needle”

  1. It is easy to count the losses, pile them up in those spare rooms or journal pages — “But wait,” a thought comes, “there’s something more. To balance the books, for every loss there must have been a gain, else there was nothing to loose.” Then that other poet’s words ring true: “‘Tis better to have loved and lost than never to have loved at all.” — Alfred Lord Tennyson

    And, once more, I am transported somewhere by your beautiful kaleidoscope of images.

  2. Reading between the lines–sometimes, I wish it weren’t a gift.

    “I am a string of colored glass about memories neck

    And as the rocket becomes totem in rain swollen skies

    I wish myself an astronaut

    To propel from tierra and leave behind legacies

    Of loss

    On a hot night, my hand sweats the melting ice tonguing glass

    And in our imagination
    we are needed

    Vouched for by a tight stitched safety net spread over jagged edge”

    A Writer’s pain breaks out in words. You weave them well, Candice, always.

  13. I was told I said thank you and sorry too much
    So I quit saying both
    Though it was only a habit bourne from
    Being from people who never apologized.

    …. as memories fade in and out … and jagged scars truth into the open, as blinding for the light one then lives, understanding sometimes too late, how nurture can actively be more damaging than instinctual, self-preservational nature …. and cycles repeat, and one endures, and is as of an indentured slave, wishing that

    And in our imagination
    we are needed

    Vouched for by a tight stitched safety net spread over jagged edge”

    Such a fascinating piece – these words are always so startling for the truths hidden and revealed, for the emotions you pull up from the depths; the images and ways you weave these stories is always breath-taking – and extremely gripping.

Comments are closed.