“Wherever she was, there was Eden” Adam lamenting beside Eve’s grave.  – Mark Twain

There is a deep mysterious ocean of strangers.
Everyone we know once rose from its cool depths, just breaking the surface at first,
then growing almost imperceptibly into an island, and finally a settled, mapped territory.

When love fails they become enemy lands or sink once more below the surface,
no longer known, only remembered, then less remembered, a void in the dark ocean.
Some we cry for. Some become home then suddenly collapse, leaving us in ice water a mile deep.

The rarest become Eden and we ourselves, exiles forever.
The Cupid cherub with love’s arrows becomes the cherubim with a flaming sword at the gate who stands down only to God.
Far from paradise, we hold our hand in the fire of memory, because the pain of remembering Eden lost, is better than forgetting Eden.

You are my Eden, my innocence lost, my flowering trees and peaceful beasts, my sweet water, my unknown nakedness, my new world.

We release thousands of people each year into the oblivion of unremembering.
Most without effort, as naturally as snow melts.
A few flicker on and off a while, distant lightning.

I cannot forget you, and I mean to say that it is impossible.
Because you are not a memory, you are part of me.
You are my daily experience though far away and stubbornly mute. My heart outside my body.

I feel your emotions. I feel love, sorrow, fear.
They are mine too, OUR love, sorrow, and fear.
our yearning aches, and answers through the distance between us like the troubled harmony of wolf howls.

When I release you, you do not become enemy land or a sunken void.
You and I are volcanic, rising at a distance from the same boiling sea floor
from the same restless faultline in the fiery earth. When I release you, if anything, you grow.

In the dream:

Our black islands surge and merge, they grow by push and rise by struggle.
Two lost Edens become a mountain, paradise is reborn, and innocence renewed,
beside the sweet water, underneath the flowering trees.

Hugh Miller

You are where you are going. When you remember where that was.
In the middle of life you found yourself in a dark wood, dazed and shaken,
circling slowly in the reeds, crashed in the ditch beside the road,
or stalled with a dead battery where some cruelty left you broken and alone.

And perhaps that’s where you dropped the map. Where love failed with a slammed door
and left you alone you on a sidewalk downtown, with a child holding your hand.
and from that day home wasn’t home, it was a hideout, a lean-to, a make do, a rented perch to hold
and protect the sacred half broken love that you gathered up gently and held in a blanket on your lap
Whispering “don’t worry love, I’ll be your home, home is where we are together”
as the wind shook the walls.

You remembered home, and knew it must still be somewhere
whole and golden, simple and safe, true and untouched
by the callous fist that you witnessed batter it coldly down.
On the hurried shores of every day – and through every night with and without sleep,
you and home called to each other across the dark, never finding the others hand.

But the map waits where you dropped it, and shows where you placed your mark and
Home comes home when two souls bless it with one true love
and two souls make one open heart,
and a single  forever
with a single YES
that outweighs
every maybe, and “for a while” in this world.

the first thing you lose is the comfortable
story of how much time you have ahead
It’s clothing, a drape, wrapped around you,
Ripped away, you are naked instead

existence is naked, sky and earth,
future and past, in the raw.
Aghast and shaken, you feel at once
the unfairness of it all:

Cruel and cold beyond measure,
beyond measure, because now,
as never before –
you have nothing left at all,

and nothing raced across everything
unwinding at terrible speed.

A white-hot voice without a sound
filled the earth and shook the ground.
YOU WASTED YOUR TIME
YOU DID NOT LOVE
YOU WASTED YOUR TIME
YOU DID NOT LOVE ENOUGH
LOOK AT HOW YOU SHOULD HAVE LOVED

Four faces appeared inside my heart
four faces of the ones I love
The ones I love with all my heart
with each, shame shook me like a rag
and showed me who I should have been
and showed me what I should have done and
Every way I should have loved
those who were my few, and one.

I ached for them, despaired for them,
despaired and ached for me.
somewhere in here, it shifted
and I began to see,

I saw that I wasn’t dying,
I saw that I had some time
but relief was shouldered to the side
by the burning truth that I now knew
from the moment that I thought I died

Hugh Miller

In the morning before dawn, I know west is the direction of my feet. Soon it will be the direction where I don’t see the sun but the sun sees me, finger pointed at my back, never takes a break.I smell water everywhere but it’s useless, molecules under pebbles, if I could lift a square acre and tilt it toward a drinking glass would a teaspoon be a good guess? Or less? Too challenging for an ant to slake his thirst. What is smaller than an ant and needs water? I forget again. Remember yesterday? I panicked and tried to hide from the sun, and finding nothing to get in or behind, tried to run, a scarecrow late for work. Blisters down there somewhere still talking about it, I miss grass.Bad dad in back of my head reminds me today might be it, possibly tomorrow, definitely not much more than that. “I know, shut up” I say and all the little water molecules that were close enough to hear, quiver uncomfortably “don’t worry” I say gently”you’re safe from me, you little fuckers.”  The horror in the east clears his throat with the first noticeable light. “I’m going” I tell something, and rise up to the person position, my body feels like a bunch of badly tied strings, the knots are getting looser every day.

~

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I have stood on beaches and in forests eating solitude like beef stew,
I have smiled at parties with loneliness bones stuck in my throat,
I have turned from a friend parting as if to a better friend &
and I’ve dreaded goodbye and the descent to my own dark company.

what is it that is full when emptiness can fill us?
& what is empty when abundance leaves us starving?
what is this tide that rises and retreats in us?
what moon does it follow?

I have raced along the beach in twilight
to catch that tide and swim with it
avoiding the strewn once loved things
abandoned in the sand, denying that I am one of them
though I am here and alone

the ocean withdrew and left a desert here
I settle down in the bleak dunes and wait, my head full
of calling seabirds and crashing waves.

Hugh Miller

In the life I didn’t live with you I am not so fucking complicated, and you are slower to anger.

In the life I didn’t live with you, you didn’t collect so many reasons to give up and I didn’t provide as many.

In the life I didn’t live with you we had more sex and accepted our imperfections calmly, without anxiety.

Partly as a result, in the life I didn’t live with you, we have two children.

Yes, a boy and a girl.

And In the life I did not live with you, we are driving with them, through the forest to the sea.

Hugh Miller