It’s the lie we all believed:
if we are good enough,
brave enough,
tall enough,
smart enough,
funny enough,
sweet enough,
enough
enough
enough
enough
.....we will earn the love we want.
But darling,
don’t you know?
I could never have loved you enough-
you were an ocean,
and I
was only a
sieve.
Sartre taught us:
absence can haunt a place.
You have been,
and remain,
not here.
You
not being here
fills up
all the space
in the room,
in my heart,
and all of time.
Today,
the child
that opened
my womb,
the only one
that was born
a stranger
to you,
obediently lifted
her chin,
and let me purge
her skin of
imperfections.
This remains,
the quest
for clarity,
to find
no blemish
in any extension
of myself.
She understood,
as you
once did,
that it was
love
that made me
reach for
her face,
that the sting
would be short
and the soothing
immediate.
Einstein taught
that entanglement
leads to quantum
nonlocality.
If two quantum systems meet,
he said,
and then separate,
even across a distance
of thousands of lightyears,
it becomes
impossible
to measure one system-
its position,
momentum,
polarity-
without instantly
steering the other
into a corresponding state.
Put simply,
when two
particles
are allowed to interact,
they influence each other’s
basic properties.
Even after the particles
are separated,
a change
to one results
in a corresponding change
to the other
at the exact same time.
No matter the distance,
the particles
are intimately connected
in a way that has yet
to be fully explained.
Maybe this, too, is love:
to be marked
so completely
by a single
connection.
If this is so,
I am resigned-
I will never be free
of you.
The morning after
the sacred halls
of our democracy
were desecrated,
I sat
at the breakfast table
and poured frosting
over pancakes,
smothered French toast
in berries
and butter,
salted crisp hashbrowns
and fluffy omelets.
The coffee was hot
and sweet
and I ate
as though it was
the end of
the world.
It wasn’t-
it was only
the beginning.
