Paul Willason Poet Free verse

The Other

It is always there,
never quite within range
where the mind can snare
some shadowy form, or shape
an outline and hold it long enough 
to name. 
It waits for the sun to go down 
and the evening to draw in 
like a taken breath when it comes
closer and nestles into what warmth
lingers there under the folds
of a gathered dark.

Sometimes when I am off
elsewhere and far away in thought,
I am sure it slips inside my head
and enters where memories are,
trying on a face, posing 
in some familiar scene, 
rummaging through what a child 
left there long ago as if 
it was searching for itself.

And there are mornings 
when waking I sense its presence 
in the dissolving residue of a dream,
a small footprint left on that 
shore between awareness and sleep,
an indent, a scooped out hole 
where something broken
took refuge and sought comfort
in being near.

There are dark times 
when it almost becomes 
a plumbed in part of me, 
each bunkered in our own
adjoining rooms, held apart 
by a wall neither of us
want to breach. We have spent
a good part of our lives here,
holding onto what should be set free,
fearing that if we did, one of us
would cease to be.

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