—the most useful temporary knot or noose.
What can I say? I turned a corner. No matter
that I doubled back, there was still progress. I was lying
low, crossing under both my coming and going,
and when I rose to see where I was, felt the cool
air on my face, I skidded like a skater, wrapped around
myself again, burrowing back up through the small
figure eight I’d made of myself. How secure it all seemed,
how sure to result in something unfaltering—patriotic,
even. But the way things have gone, I’m left with
a looseness through the center.
There’s been this tendency to let things drop.
It’s the opposites I have trouble with,
the way my attention begins expanding as if
the richness has eased past the borders, no longer
lives in this constriction, this lump in my throat.
I drew you to me with such firmness, you were sure
of the implications. The exact point at which I began
to be disappointed, who knows? The more I gave myself
room to work it out, the more I felt the movement
of possibilities within me. I should have felt relieved
when all fell through, but I only felt what I am,
how I’m made. “Open your mouth,” my mother used to
say, coming at me with a bar of soap because of some
word I’d said. I opened, as I do now, willing to take
the bitterness, to have done what I did.