I was babysitting for a friend a couple years ago, and jotted down this poem in her dimly-lit living room after putting the kids to bed. Something about the author's unabashed telling stirred in me an eagerness to take risks, to jump when the opportunity presents itself. And simultaneously to be aware of the beauty and gravity in each of our choices.
Genesis 1:28
Kate Daniels
In the dank clarity of the Green Line tunnel
we hatched our plan - to grow a creature
from those nights of love, those afternoons
of thick scents, those liquid mornings, odor
of coffee mingling with musk. Actually, he wanted
six, he said, standing there in the chill, a train
thundering up like an epiphany the two of us
verified together.
I knew then it was over, irrevocably
over, my previous life, alone and unloved, could see
how it would finally play itself out, starring him
and our creatures, the chaotic kitchen, the rumpled
beds, my wrinkled shirttails smeared with egg.
Helplessly, I tilted toward him and those sweet
images, to his mouth and his smell, toward my life
and my future, the nights we would recline, locked
and rocking in groaning love, the months my belly
would expand with our efforts, the bloody bringing forth
of two of him and one of me.
I stood for one last moment alone,
inside a cloud of grace, a pure and empty
gift of space where history released its grip.
Its bulging bag of bad memories burst open
in the doors of a train and was carried off
to a distant city I swore never to revisit.
And then I turned to his lips and his tongue,
to our hands in our gloves unbuckling each other,
calculating how quickly we could travel
back home. To anyone watching, it must have
looked like lust - two lovers emboldened
by the anonymity residing in a subway stop.
What kind of being could possibly see
a new world was being made, a universe
created? Who could have known how called
we were to what we were doing? How godlike
it was, how delicious, how holy?
