Walk sign turns red. A woman waits to cross.
She pulls a tiny
mirror out and primps.
She checks her eyeliner; applies lip gloss;
Then looks right
at me—and I get a glimpse
Of oceans no one's ever sailed. And all
The unsailed deep
in me that no one knows—
Because we meet the world as an atoll
That hides a
continent—sees her and glows
Like the Atlantic under a full moon.
For one brief
moment, that look stops me short
Like the loud bursting of some kid’s balloon
Or the bang of a
.38’s report.
The solid earth
cracks open, eggshell-thin.
Do I jump off,
or let myself fall in?
Some people open up like ancient caves.
Some have thick
plastic on their heirloom chairs.
Some have a cellar packed with hidden graves
And some run
classrooms full of questionnaires.
No matter what or how much the world sees,
We all contain the
inaccessible—
A country of uncategorized trees
And cryptic
creatures by the barrowful—
Unglimpsed, no matter how much we reveal
About ourselves—no
matter who we say
We are. What we portray, as if it’s real,
Is like one planet
in the Milky Way.
That’s what I
see—and seeing, recognize—
The moment that
I meet this woman’s eyes.
How can I fool myself into believing
That I'll know you, I think, when under all
I splash through is a hidden ocean, heaving
With tides
unknown, held in by the sea wall
That is your public face? Even your eyes
Only go down so
far. And while there’s much
In them to satisfy and tantalize,
There’s bone
beneath that skin which I can’t touch.
It doesn’t matter if or how I’ve cared.
What only matters
is the ground you yield.
I only get to swim in what’s been shared.
I only get to map
what’s been revealed.
And even if you
yield it all, there’ll be
A world—a
life—that I will never see.
We have eons in us, but all we know
Is moments. They
sum up our history.
And if we're lucky, when they're shared, they grow
Into new islands
on a common sea.
No—not an island—it’s a mountaintop
No one can measure
without long deep dives.
We live between the darkness and the drop
And when we die,
the tip’s all that survives.
And now and then we meet at a crosswalk
Between where we
are now and where we’re going—
A pebble from an undiscovered rock;
The splinter from
a tree that’s always growing—
And wonder—will
we let this spark ignite?
Or smile and
part, when the walk sign turns white?
Copyright 2016 Matthew J Wells
