by Emily Critchley
Yes, they are alive and not like triangles
And I, in my soul, am alive too.
I feel I must shout and write, to tell
Of this in a way, that knowing you may be drawn from me.
And I do amid the noise of casual isolation,
Machinery of history, the chance to sing of us
Superseded by you, is you.
You hold me up to the light in a way
I would always have expected, and yet still am surprised, perhaps
Because you always tell me the idea supersedes us, perhaps
You are right. Yet the great spaces loom.
Between our kind. I am ever yours to be forfeited, to desire.
I cannot ever think of me. If I begin
I am back in a room in which the chairs ever
Have their backs toward me,
Pelted by words, actual light
That laughs off suggestion, goes on producing Art
Under a general wing, same wild light of the day
That is always true. I pledge me to an idea
I was assigned by birth, which I cannot ever stop remembering.
Remembering to remember. Remember to pass beyond you into the us
In the winged shadow, the space you will never know.
Taking me from myself, in the path
Which the blind birth of the day has consigned me to.
I prefer “us” in the plural, I want “us.”
You should go from me, all victorious and whole
Like the light and the day.
And then I start getting this feeling of exhaustion.
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