--safe
feels like not feeling
compelled to explain to strangers
why I’ve gone gray.
Not offering apologies
for my knee on its last leg,
grinding static like an old record
not knowing it’s near its end,
vibing with a forest cane
up and down a wooden staircase—
leaning, letting silence
carry me, carry us, the temporary
attendants of nothing.
The rules were simple:
Be here. Be quiet.
We followed them, mostly—
until being wordless
begat wanting, begat understanding
versions of each other rising
where language couldn’t go.
Our shoulders bent toward mending
fences we’d built, gates we’d broken,
perimeters of limitation
we’d only imagined.
We all started the same:
first names and a few sentences—
outlines of persons offered
at opening circle, passed
from lips to ears
one last time, leaving all other
explanations of self
in the dark of our own keeping.
Tent, teepee, house—
just three compartments
between us.
Mornings came in fog and dew,
gravel wet with everyday collapse,
pebbles gathering themselves
over paths we’d taken
to get to where we could walk willingly
with the unevenness
of each of us
limping differently
toward our version of better,
fearing most
who we’d be
if we never began again.
It’s a lot to ask of a single weekend,
six hundred dollars and good intentions:
Three days of silence,
a retreat, to lay our lives
in the arms of hush, to trust
in the caretakers of breath Herself.
We never named it,
not aloud—not even in the notes
no one would ever read—
lest the wind overhear,
lest the sense of it dissolve
before we could claim its salvation—
that single hay-straw strand
of grace buried
under the needlestack of years
we’d been hauling,
only to feel the relief
of setting the load down.
In the end, I think we found it,
that feeling of being—
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