Self_Portrait with an Airspace

Self-Portrait With An Airspace

My mother with her fey green eyes & warm touch,
is as friendly as tragedy & love allows.
I am born with a caul on my face that I touch
with curious, sticky fingers, and my mother names me
for the dead child of a neighbor
It is not a promising beginning, but then, there is the destiny
of things to consider & I imagine at the last moment,
some ghost guardian with good intentions, stuffed optimism
beneath my seer's mask.
I was an agreeable child, sometimes hidden in a lane of mud pies,
and along the rock quarries reaching over the blue holes of water.
I was meant to see things, not always in my favor, but for the best,
and the best was what I saw, because my eyes would not wander,
but looked too deeply at everything.
It was an inconvenience to the heart.
As a young woman I crashed into the aura of others vibrations
and bled my own blood in a pining, a pain of sorts, that I could not
control, could not decipher from my own.
It was my undoing. A give without take.

There is a universe now of whispers and mutiple dreams.
I try to hold a straight soul, but love is flexible & twists
intentions to its purpose. I am so human that the angels sweat
and nearly swear a vexation, but stop short, because, perhaps,
they too, are victims of the silver gleam of hope.
Sometimes I want to scream, Oh, let us Pray! when the beauty
of it all is in a hiatus of thanks & the sun is a playground,
handed on a platter by the night sky & the flowers lift
in a multitude of colors in a soft light.
Sometimes I want to drop into a fetal world, when everything
has spilled in a garbage of failed brotherhood, and the gray
settles in a weariness of service that cannot end on a good note.
But most often, I think of the caul.
I think of the covering that allows me to see the best
of what I can be, what we can all be, in some moment we least expect,
when all that is human in us, slips into a fleshy background,
and we pull some spirit forward, with an open hand,
giving sacrifice to the purity of the soul.

Reviews

[Gandré]

There is a universe now of whispers and mutiple dreams.-------I liked this line very much. So your reflections of your past are combined with the now and your moral values, purity is everything. I loved this!

[Sel Whiteley]

This is incredibly beautiful, what stength the persona shows, what an inspirition they are. And it's fabously penned. The imagery is so sharp and resonant. The concept of the caul and masks is, as W.K.Kortas says, seamlessly woven providing such a brilliant structure and yet so, well, subliminal too. The words are so direct, they're spine-tingling. A masterful piece.

[W.k.kortas]

The notion of the caul and masks, is effortlessly, seamlessly woven through this piece; it provides a strong frame for the whole piece to rest on, yet is not intrusive in any sense. Throw in the wonderful imagery and use of language, and you have a technical tour de force; it's so well built that the structure is almost invisible.

[Emily B]

There was something about these words that I was afraid to get close to, something airy, maybe I was afraid the shiny bubble would burst if I breathed too deeply near it. Or that startled the words would fly away like the cardinal. There was something flowing beneath these words that drew me in so close and it may be that I recognized something of myself in the lines. That may be it. This is definitely one to come back to and read again.