6 February 2022

Woman is a Ray of God

1. 

I began to wander. 

There was no use being candid.

I lost the key of language,

misplaced it willingly. 

An endangered approximation 

became me, that afternoon

outside the analyst’s office, trying

to repeat her steely words.

Finally crowned with a cruel,

cruel precision I thought I wanted—

I said nothing. 

2. 

I never belonged in this city.

Lived instead in the borderline.

Capitulated to my mother’s

language, its closure, then my own,

and finally I surrendered you,

beloved, and your poetic God, 

for whom mercy precedes

the dumb blossoms of wrath.

3. 

I did not consider medication.

Perhaps I accepted this settling

into rot, welcomed a dementia 

that prematurely reveals me.

Like the grandmother who kicks 

away her lover’s cane.

Emotional volatility. Impulsivity.

Extreme fear of abandonment.

A funny thing, our inner lives,

when discussed in such sterile terms.

4. 

My excavation of love, an

impossibility, began and ended

with you. Our patchwork of exile

knitted from salt water, 

something related to God,

or lust, and you said to me 

in Arabic, that Woman is

a ray of God. Now that

you are far from my orbit,

unsheathed from its

insistent light, do you still

think Woman is a ray of God,

she is not just the beloved.

She is not just the beloved.

5. 

I take a walk that does not end

in a new life. I begin to wander,

across the verdant lawns,

basked in everything as the sun 

slices by. Woman is a creator—

you may even say she was not created. 

I may have lost you, but

I no longer covet that clean slate.

Because who was there, before 

causation, before language 

and diagnosis, before learning the art 

of tending to love’s many corpses? 

who was there before it all,

but Divine Woman, and her poetry,

the one true founding act,

the first and only 

necessary pain?