Chain of Being

Now I understand our lies.
When her water broke, the rupture
widened to rapture: soft music, clean
waiting, coffee. Fourteen hours

wrenched the rapture to torture; still life
with sweat, shakes, and needles.
your mother groaned, you father wept.
Into the burdened world you crept,

a last reluctance.
How blind you, how blind
I! Only in the transluminary
mucus of the cable did I first see

the chain of being
human: buried snare in the light
of wedding bands, shackles
snapped on the breath

when the cord is snipped.
Was this the higher mystery?
to come to knowing unknowing,
like a head thrust through glass to see?

We say it grows a heart to make one,
we call it sugar, laud our neighbors
when they return with little toes.
Now I undersand the trap,

its doubled jaws twining us:
wanting to know your entire life,
if I had my want, it would mean tragedy.
If not, I would die wanting.

Either way, we are only partial relatives--
even we.
I hear the chain rattle
behind your sleep-sighs.

It winks in your solemn eyes,
threads through me, back
to those whose names are lost,
and through you, to the ones

who wait for naming. But
I put my arms around you.
She puts her arms around us. Interlinked
in love, we will pull our own ways, strain

with alien bodies, dragging
lodestones of grief that gather
mountains through decades.
Each of us a blink, a nod

to strangers wearing our faces.
This freight I have inherited
from you--what will you loose
when you tie for your children

the next rung on this eternal
rope ladder? Will you,
as I, take the scissors slowly?

Copyright 2006 Trevor Kearns
bio
Barnwood magazine
Contents 06