With
       

Beyond her face the white ceiling,
featureless to just-opened eyes.
Every morning (it probably happened once)
she sat on the edge of my bed and,
hand just touching my hair perhaps,
woke me almost without transition,
hers or mine, and silently because
she knew her presence was enough.
All that was beyond her was my seeing
in the moment of readjustment her,
how she looked at me from her distance
with what then seemed the pity of one
who could see in another what
the other had yet to discover or forget.

Retrospectively it is the sphere of what
I have yet to forget or face up to
recurrently rising in the dream's field
of vision, cut off at the field 's edges,
by them. Until the field would incline
and the sphere recede, backward into borrowed
light, all there now and indiscernible. Be or
be like the mother reaching through vision
because she knows, or even has learned,
filling distance with light only illuminates
the distance. And aside from the contact,
or before or beneath but not beyond it,
and whatever happens anyway next,
to wake is to consent: to feel with: to the world.

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Copyright © 2019 Mark Dow All rights reserved
from Plain Talk Rising
PTR
Reprinted by Verse Daily® with permission