MUIR WILD

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Still Within Each Other

January 22, 2018 by Kate Muir

still within each other

for Jay

 

You’re gone

there, at sea

 

perhaps only a horizon,

distant thought of here, of me

 

though I’d like to think

you’ve seen me, my

 

silhouette somewhere in the wake

somewhere in the line

 

between sleep and dream

as I see you cast into this

 

winter sky, this shallow light

these familiar trees, always

 

you, it seems, standing there

as something more than memory,

 

you’re so far away that all I have is wish

and I wish you could see me today

 

as something more than picture

something more than transposition

 

something more than reflection,

than subtle dissipating fragments

 

because today I see myself as more

than a filament of doubt left by mother

 

I see something more of this light

and perhaps if you were here you’d

 

see in my eyes what I rarely see

and you’d fathom another depth of me

 

  yet perhaps you see me always

as whole, as something more

 

than I see myself, than this

sadness from a mother who worked too much

 

who tried to love and did but was tired

and you see, this is what I’ve been seeing

 

when I look down at my pregnant body

I see myself as her, her never seeing herself

 

as something that could be enough

as something whole, as something of depth

 

and now this, this heartbeat within me

has brought me to see a certain grace

 

and I feel untangled from a part of her

though I was once a pulse within her

 

as she was within her mother and

I wonder if she looked at her pregnant skin

 

And saw something more than a mirror

reflection within of a mother who clung

 

to bitterness, who left her with this,

this fragment of an unexplored self

 

that grew as concentric circles in water

unknowingly expanding toward distant horizons

 

and you see, though you can’t see me,

today I feel separated from mother after mother

 

and have shared with this other

this exploring, this pulse of earth

 

this feeling of rock and snow and happiness

in the depth of a mountain’s silhouette

 

and I just want you to see my cheeks

after the cold, and notice how my hair

 

held the snow in its curl, and how it shaped

my face and how when I looked down

 

I felt beautiful and loved and seen

as though you heard me hundreds of miles away

 

and reached out your hands to brush my wet hair

behind my ear, to warm my cheeks, to kiss my lips

 

to make our hearts beat a little quicker

as we, so distant, are still within each other

 


Though there seemed a vastness in the night sky, there existed within it a space as enclosed and tranquil as this distant landscape framed by nearby pines.  And though my route to reach this narrowing space might appear the same day to day, it is part of this natural world and part of a rambling mind, and thereby filled with such intricacies and changes.  There is a certain comfort in choosing the same approach, as it becomes meditative.  My mind can relinquish to the grace of breath and movement and being.  Today the air was winter-thick,—damp and warm—,and here it smelled richly of evergreen.  I thought of how many times I’ve arrived at the same place, and how many times I’ve arrived alone.  I thought of how many times I’ve looked into that distance, through these trees, between those mountain silhouettes, and felt a sense of awe.  Yet today, 22 weeks pregnant, I could feel the slight movement of another body within me, and had such a clear realization that I was sharing this heart’s experience of night and light and rock and mountains and breath so intimately with another.  It was the first time in my pregnancy I was able to feel as though I wasn’t just a replica of my own mother, bound to repeat a cycle.  I wanted you, there at sea, to see me as I experienced this.  I wanted to look at you and tell you what I felt as I looked into tonight’s night sky, and I suppose I did, because this love does have a way of drawing something so distant, so close, so as to be so beautifully enclosed within.


January 22, 2018 /Kate Muir
nature, poetry, muir, blog, prose, nature writing, imagery, vermont poet, new england writers, kate muir
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