Walking Away From You......For Susan Poem by John Tansey

In the black and blue
bruised bone of night
Its knob ends, gnawed at by stray dogs;
I fight for the shank, and as a cane,
walk barefoot along the permafrost.

Illumined, by a full orange moon:
My torchlight in this dark pitch
Brightly discernible through the sticks.
The gravity of it, alone, pulls
every lonely soul toward it.

Millions of miles to go before the night
is over, will it be enough distance
to forget you, or the color of your hair?
Would time, alone, be enough to heal
my broken heart.

No, my broken body, since every living cell
is alive with the love of you...
and when the heart breaks,
I break completely in two
like some delicate thing!

A solitary crow, a loner, just like I:
Both unsociable aberrations,
cawing in the arctic cold...

I must walk on,
Where all the millions of dead have walked
Following the moonlight
That white tunnel that all who came
back, said they saw;
But for me, it is a travelling back to the womb.

I come upon a creek and walk along it's bank
Where the moon hangs out over the sea
holding water
And wading the night tide
Upto my waist, then my shoulders.
All along,
following the breast of the female mother moon.

Mother, do we ever reach our horizons?

The moon is a watery grave
I have gone under.
My body aches under the stress
I am under the abyss of the ocean floor.
The pressure per square inch is crushing
And if I let out my last breath,
the ocean will come into me
and like a baby, I will breathe water again!

Then I will grow gills, become a fish,
swimming in the primordial soup,
back, through the billions of years
into the stark, dark matter
which was the beginning of it all,
but dark matter is a carnivore,
consuming the universe and ourselves.

Billions of years later, the first Sun
would coalesce into the bright white light
of the first day and first night star of Bethlehem!

Yes, I have travelled far enough
and enough time has passed
to forget you...


John Tansey