Alone in the Kissing Breeze

By myself, beside myself,
alone on the waterfront
tactile and sensory for the
first time, watching
like film glitches in a '40s film, rainbow
bridges and crystal globes
doubled and spinning, ringed
and familiar, like how
the halves of cut pearls
radiate
the same layered symmetry
as displayed in the miniature nymphs
that float hazily before
my eyes,
ballet-ing in and out
of the panorama I'm facing
and hanging, star-like,
from the shimmering pistils of my
blurred eyelashes.

For the first time in a year
and a half I am alone
in my silence
and quietly complacent in a self-imposed quarantine,
the nursery of all my latent
and brilliantest thoughts.

Grey-faced like a statue
of a saint,
I resolve to know the saints, to osmotically become
a manifestation of their devotion
through my understanding of their lives.
Pink and fleshy,
I shuttle my ankles closed together,
a skip-and-a-jump motion
that makes all my halfhearted attempts at modesty even more childlike;
to keep one's legs closed
and folded
on such a beautiful day
on this old pier
in this kissing breeze
will always be a halfhearted game
of hopscotch
with my impish and reluctant self.


7.18.10