Wendy E. Braun – This Existence

anything here.

More than I have been allowed in years
and years of words,
of shame,
of love,
of wonderings like wine spilling over empty cups
and hives that drown in their own honey.

I looked to Anteros but he only offered silence.
Winged things understand little of the distance.

The gods cannot comprehend the chasm
where I’ve focused my gaze and immersed
beliefs in dancing shadows,
how it divides and swallows up
all that is known or what could be if
certainty existed at all.

My love walks a wire,
each step promising something more salient and yet
they say I’ve cried away the bits of light that illuminate.

I’ve cried hovering there and balanced between
the book of flying weighted against the history of love
without rescue from you because you
are like the white stag of winter
elusive in all forms.

There is that nothing space where tears create a river
for wild things with fins and things with wings
and there I am with arms,
and legs,
and a wire.