down the gun, bandage the wound,

carry the water and share our bread.

But under all that, all we can do is

hold each other and listen. The one,

an indispensable lifting. The other,

an indispensable putting down. So

when you fall, I will help you up.

But when I fall on the inside, just

sit with me and rub the cuts no one

can see. This is how we make it to

tomorrow: fall and rub, lift and put

down. Like a piece of cliff letting

go after a thousand trials

to add to the shore.

As Rachel Wakes

AS RACHEL WAKES

I watch as you return from the tethered sleep of your surgery, and I realize that the things that fell us change, but we take turns, life after life; one of us bearing down to make it through while the other soothes and calms as we go. As you return, I feel our counterparts in the river of time—a Spanish seamstress cups water to her brother’s lip, and a Greek sailor dips his captain’s swollen leg in a stinging sea, and hundreds-turned-angel rock another’s head or rig a splint or soak up someone’s blood—and I step with them as I brush the hair from your tired face. You are back.

I see the needle in your arm and feel my lifetimes of puncture. You stir and ask, “Will you come again?” I’m going nowhere, sweet-innocent-wearing-down-to-love, nowhere but here, where I have landed over and over. Don’t we all live like this, trying to bear what weighs us down? Isn’t this our unspoken bond: to lift what will crush us, hoping when we tire someone with fresh legs will spell us for a while?

Your will to live ripples beneath your pain, and I know that God in his kingdom of blinding light sparked us to be spirit-moths drawn to what refuses to die. So we hover when the other breaks. I don’t know why there is this geography between pain and peace. Or why we need to be broken for the element of love to take over. Or how many lifetimes we must suffer to understand that we do this in order that the Universe can complete itself. How many times must we trade places to wear a path between us?

While you were under, the peonies opened. It is their small pushing through that enables me to believe. We may never speak of this, but I have seen the very seed of what has lived forever. All this I saw in your small thirst upon waking.

Dance of the Seed

DANCE OF THE SEED

The beauty of souls laid bare is that we are then all naked at once, together, our sameness and our differences revealed in the glory of the truth of us.

B. NUR CHEYENNE