Unseen

I've just scratched out this poem I hesitate to put it up as it is because I wonder if it will be completely understood. Too encoded. But, isn't that the essential center of this piece anyway?


Where We Are Now

Their language is not enough for you.
Comprised of the tangible, the structured
it creates boundaries where you want none.

And yet- language is everything to you
as long as it is
your code
one where there is an overlap,
where several realities can coexist-
one where cats are pouring out of the refrigerator
and the woodstove is a bulldog
on sturdy legs
whose teeth I brush as I scrape out the ashes.

From the beginning I knew your language.
I wanted you to believe me
I know you, I whispered to a wailing infant
Do you understand?
I know you, I pleaded.

When I told you that babies
and baby animals
are cradled in their mother’s belly
before they are born,
you lit up.
Ah, proof that there is this other place.
The air around you crackled as you smiled
“Tell me again
tell me again
Where do they live?”

I am keeping a journal
in an old leather bound book
(words again)
that your father made for me when I was seventeen.
I have a conversation there with you-
the later you-
one where I tell you
what I want to tell you right now.
I tell you that there is magic
that you make your own magic.

I am telling you later what I can’t say now.

That they are afraid of their own limitations.
That their high pitched nervous affectation,
their complete unknowing
seizes me with a cold panic.

Can any of them see what you see?
Are any of them willing to grant you the invisible?