Always Your Shadow: Poetry of Madison

I woke up from a dream of you

to the reality of a cold pillowcase

next to me

and sheets that housed only ghosts.

The light in the window tricked me

pretending to be the bright light

hiding in your eyes.

I forgot to close my window

and the scent of the sea

drifts in with the breeze.

I wanted to get a house elsewhere

but nowhere else felt like home

as the shores of the ocean.

And though it’s salt in a wound

I know it’s also the only thing that heals.

I still get sea sick on the land,

still feel the ground pitch beneath

my sea legs – like they were still caught

on that sinking ship –  grasping desperate

for the warmth of your hand.

I wear an anchor around my throat;

a modern crucifix.

But you are not a savior, you’re my sailor.

I don’t wear it for penance, love is no sin

but I do wear it to keep a memory of you.

A memento, a symbol of what we were

what we could have been, what we are.

From it dangles a single pearl

a hidden treasure found

in the dark of the sea.

I hear the waves

and I know like wings

they carry you away

and they bring you back.

I want to follow and see where you’ve gone,

marvel and the change in the oceanography

of your body,

but sailor, your wings have taken you to sea

and I wear an anchor on the land.

I despair at the loneliness of a blank page,

all that final and silencing white

as if it’d eat all our words.

The ones I meant to put there last night.

I didn’t want you to go.

The harsh blue of the lined page

are chains that box in the words,

denying them the freedom to mean

so much more than you thought.

It’s so hard to read between the lines.

In some languages there are no words

that can pin the feeling to the page. Sorrow,

pain, or loss, the meanings are too deep.

All a language can offer is a phrase

like the Urandi’serarijarijaka:

the sorrow of something lost.

A sailor missing in the waves of the sea,

a letter of pleading or desire

carried by the wind out a window

left open - careless.

Now, I send bottles out with the tides;

the letters still hand written

like the way all good poems start.

I hope the waves will take them out to you

or else be found by another lonely lover

waiting for the sea to write back.