Pieces of a Sea: What Narcissus Saw When He Looked to See

We fall.

Again and again
we fall...
from the highest places,
from the mountaintops (those palisades!)
from the ledges out of windows,
from the nest
from the hearts of those who loved us best...
from me,
from you
we're falling
in love
and out
again...

The cages
and the caged:
a goat on a chain wrapped around
a stake in the ground,
chewing cud with vacant eye,
long-named chemicals drifting through these veins like
slow-swimming salmon,
my heartbeat a thunder of applause
as I'm plummeting
as I fall beneath the skin of me
into that empty sea of secret places...

Into the sea of the too-oft unknowns that lie
between the two of us,
pieces of me
spent freely on failed love and fallen friends,
mothers in hospital beds who confess that children
were never the dreams they had dreamt
for their tiny, pale frames...
secrets
again and again,
the line between us all...

Pieces
of a sea,
pieces assembled to make the dreams I dream,
walls and walls all built like cages
in a zoo
in a prison
a church
in an altar
a cell, a heart,
a crystal ball;
pieces cast like tattooed bones to form the lazy shape of me,
the dissonant,
the quiescent all begging to be spoken of
in soft, sweet breath...

The cages and
the caged....
the sirens and the call
all much the same;
how I can take you inside of me and still not know a part
of the story behind your eyes,
that soliloquy;
sons who barely know their brown-eyed mothers,
those beautiful women all humbled by age,
brought low
to see that the world is not as infinite as they had hoped,
marrow sitting in bones
passed on to children like dice

thrown
thrown
thrown
out into an endless sea
in a gambit of hope,
again and again with the dreaming
the falling into the depths of the sea:
the oceanic,
the depths of me falling away
into a yawning night
where all the unknowns sleep,
where all the secrets lie...

secrets
again and again,
secrets always just the same:
the unspoken,
the quiet embers I hold inside
that flicker
that glow,
that light all the world aflame as I'm walking,
as I'm diving
down
down into murky depths of me.


~ S. A. Warmack