Eye-Level

Eye-Level

Listen when the words are full enough to
let you see your pain fully, in the light of day,
from every angle; listen when the words can
untangle the chains wrapped around the pole of
your existence. When pain stabs it is no more spiritual
to speak of joy
than it is to laugh at the sounds of a widow’s grief.

I’ve seen your eyes, dark in the shade, alive in the light,
brown as nature, deep as the pools that fill craters left
by meteorites taking a wrong turn home.

You speak your best when you speak the fewest,
you love the best unexplained. I remember the words
which hid the frightened past when the shivering past
was only a decade and a half barely old. I can still
see
the moments when, eye to eye, trust had won they
day,
and cry or rain, stay or pain, like a single raindrop
suspended midair (you saw it, I saw it, eye-level,
as if it had been there from the earth’s first mists)
and though severely separated by decades in time
the trust in love would live forever

Encased like rain, saved like a single tear
that held the pain and the remedy, and all
the songs we wait to hear. We sing them together
(having never heard them before) as if we had
written each and every line. So a tear,
a raindrop,
a lyric,
a diamond
are all collected at eye-level
by two at once who knew trust was
the pain’s best memory.