The circumstances of
your life,
and also mine because
I love you boundlessly,
disintegrate.
Our conversation,
through the gaping
miles of wire,
feels like a crumbling,
like a quagmire,
like a caving-in.
We sigh by turns
beneath the burdening.
So powerless, this is
beyond our fixing.
We two, so practiced in
the art of buffering,
"there-there",
speak just the truth
and listen to it spoken.
Our brokenness laid bare.
The careful process
of good-bye begins,
separating you and I,
untangling the strings.
Then softly, in
an altered voice,
as soothing as a prayer,
you share two recent
dreams with me.
The images come clear:
a castle and a little girl; a lifeboat and a guide. And something passes over me,
a boundless, loving energy,
that leaves in me this
absolute, irrational serenity.
-- Deb Cooper