Gilled Was I Poem by Glenn Latal

There comes a moment when the membrane is pierced.
When our invulnerability leaks from us,
Silently, invisibly, from one second to the next.
Our cocoon of faith has sprung a doubt.
We’ve passed into a new world.
It’s as though the air used to be liquid,
But a new dimension has been added.
How do we now breathe a gas?

Then we remember:
The cold morning wind, that awakening, scours the soul.
One dawn, leaving the other’s apartment,
You realize you are capable of not returning.
But love is the conviction that we wouldn’t ever have to face this again.

If I try just once more, this time, it will.

I am alone on the Larchmont platform.
There are people, but they are they,
Not remotely comparable to you or me.
Yet I’ve become one, looking anywhere other than at them.
Each of us is uniquely superior.
I will refrain from implying equivalence beyond
An embarrassed tight-lipped half smile of recognition,
As long as they reciprocate.
I too, am too busy being alone.

The light bleaches the day, draining it of life and color.
The train glides me from here to there.
Through and over the world,
Encased from buffeting breeze and chilling cold.
The wind rages within, I am no longer warm blooded.
I do not lose heat to the air, but the reverse.
The only thing that ever warms is each other.

Sometimes when it fails, neither is at fault.
Without the solace of anger, we are left with only grief.
The poise that pulled us striding into the future is gone,
Stranding me between the garden and whatever purgatory is left to me.
I look out the window at this jostling entrepôt.
It is always presumptuously prepared to enfold
The prodigal back into its embrace of comfort, if not, joy.
For late spring, it’s unseasonably raw with bluster and bereavement.

This train takes me where?
Places other people are.
Things other people do.
People other people know.
I am unique, as are we all,
In the superiority of our faceless solitude.
How could we show feeling all those things
we hadn’t know were still there
and that we would have to face again?

If I try just once more, this time…