The Triggering:

storm:
out the barn door
hancock shaker village

The Triggering: 

While Waiting for Richard's Making Certain It Goes On

I Open Deborah's Rough Music.

Some things won’t translate backwards.

Some things can’t be undone,

though it takes  years to learn this, years

Such were the serial exhaustions of my beliefs…

                                                                Deborah Digges

                                                Rune for the Parable of Despair

Before you arrived I was well into someone else.  I tried

to be patient waiting but she was so…

her black spine freckled with the claim

of her given name, slipped thin between the rest,

but a reckoning, a vigor to be sure, and so

I opened her and her honest to goodness lust

sprung up from every curve every line every dot

hung above the ‘i’.  After it was finished I went back

for more, and so I know going on like this

I’ll be weeks and weaks away because I need some

of what she’s willingly put down in silk, in thick

unblemished perfection.  I’ve been with her before

and often, though she’s never about remembering. 

When she fell from the grandstand I carried her

around inside of me and she’d say this: wind

in the bells.  That’s it.  And sometimes I was the wind,

but mostly she was.  She knew what she was

doing and because I’d never not ever once been on my knees

looking up except to the dirk to the hilt of a Jesus red,

red heart, the only one ringed with the zisiphus spina, the one

I’d watch the sun set through every Saturday afternoon

mass.  I took my turn.  I waited.  I made plans to be

a nun in a far away place.  I wanted the veil

and the cloister more than the tip

of a finger on my lips.  Imagine my anguish opening

for her for the first time and she letting me be

in complete control: the clothes she wore

that day were pine green and black.  There was

a brooch of cream where her nipple might be,

but only on the right side facing me.  The left was velvet

and it was a glimpse of light that outdid me, unhinged

my lips.  I wanted to, I really did, I wanted

to wait for you.  But your silence.  Not knowing

if you were really coming, if you might even be

dead, was the clutch of my despair.  She read that in me.

She took my hand.  She guided me with it.  I’m sorry,

but she was there.  She said she'd been waiting.  And I couldn’t

refuse.

"my day"
where Eleanor's fingers
tips and thumbs
and whole fists
touched, came down,
made her marks