Confidentiality: of Dignity

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Confidentiality: on Dignity

We shed our shapes slowly like moving water,

which ends up as it will so utterly far from home.

                                                                Jim Harrison

First maybe our thoughts are about recovering

a little dignity, stripped as it is and in pieces

on the floor, thin as mica and glinting and we

see it only if the light’s been left on.  Brittle,

it has no give when we pinch it, it isn’t stretching

the way we need it to, and the most of it stuck

to our blood, blood we’ll wash off, blood of the first

time for some and blood of the umpteenth time

for the rest of us.  I’m here to tell you that

the first step toward water will be a painting

in our brain and we’ll see the color of a blue

bruise pushing through the skin of our small

arch, as if we’d stepped on the business end

of the three-pronged extension chord just pulled out

of the socket and left lazily waiting for any at all
connection, the distance short, the hand in another

world.  And all around us is the unrecoverable: the lace

drapes, the stem ends of the late geraniums,

the way the hall, just past the cracked open

door pulls the dark out with it but does not,

cannot, replace it with a light that hasn't risen.