National Poetry Month: Magdalena

We sold everything
to be together—
silverware, a like-new mixer,
furniture, books, clothes,
an old car, and I left my jobs.
 	Before we departed
Thích Nhất Hạnh came to
Denver. He talked about
walking through despair. He said,
Look deeply. Your beloved
is still there. Maybe much closer
than you thought.
 	He was hard to hear,
because in your exhaustion
you fell asleep and
started to snore. At intermission
we left and in the parking lot
we laughed and laughed
at the impossibility.
 	It took all my bone-deep
grit to leave home,
leave family, leave doctors,
but you wanted to go. You said,
I feel alive, and
I am not my body only.
It seems I was always
going to witness your departure,
your return.
 
 
Ø
 
 
 
 
 
 
 	Here on a boulder
torso to torso, we sit together,
one form in front of another form,
with a lithic library
in the high Andean Moorlands,
sculptures made from tuff, the oldest
created 5,300 years ago, and the
River Magdalena is carving stone.
 	Was it an accident
I was most drawn to the sculpture
called The Bishop, also called,
The Midwife.
 	Fashioned out of
volcanic rock, The Midwife
is holding a baby upside-down.
A twin likeness
at the base of the sculpture
was buried under soil
for centuries, but now reflects
a dual image of itself.
 	How can we mirror
each other across time
before our own vanishings.
How can we read
what we leave behind.
 	You said,
I can't create anything new,
but together—
Here on this boulder
we look up to the sky. It's a wonder,
this monument at hand, this breath
pushed out of our mouths.
 
 
Ø
 
 
 
 
 
 	Magdalena was shaping
small pools of water in pockets
of stone. A bare-faced ibis
sounded his quintuplet alarm
when you turned to me to say
you'd stopped the medications
one month ago. The head pain,
back pain, tremors, the
cytomegalovirus—too much.
Maybe you could heal yourself
if your body could breathe,
you thought, longing for
life was tilting toward
dying as living.
 	We sat in the silent
deep. I tried to hand
the river my fear.
The lanceolate leaf
of an Andean oak
yawed into Magdalena.
 	That night, by your bed,
The Gospel of Philip
was open, a passage underlined,
Who is free through knowledge
is a slave because of love...
 	I returned to Magdalena wanting
to step through myself like the river
composing stone, day after day,
I stayed close to the water until
the letters of my name began re-
arranging.