vi: in.violet

...the salt wind lingers here,
in the swirling of seafoam and smooth stones
that fell from my lips as glass pearls
I wrote in the name of strength.

...of strength...

I spoke of strength,
yet grasped, ever-fearful, to the isolation
that I declared a solitude
and named my choice...

{It was, for a while,
as you know;
it was my pillar for a long time}

until I spent a night in the Hebrides and faced
a choice between the spiral and the void.

I chose to turn my heart to embrace the sky
and found myself penetrated, instead
by a paralyzing brightness that blinded me -
a be.wild.erment for a waif
who had, heretofore, thought of purity
as a dark, secret thing;
delicate in the night...

not this blazing accretion disk that burned
to destroy the barriers I had inherited
to keep intimacy from encroaching.


If I sacrificed my bitterness to the waves,
would I be allowed, then, some
human vulnerability?


Some tender grief before the moon
before the moon and you
before you,

whose name I have always known and never knew
until now.