Something else is there

She looked at my face and said

but who are you?

I found myself back in that old blue house

on Londonderry Lane,

looking at my mother through a blurry film dissolve,

seven years old and learning for the very first time

what fear really was, and what fear really felt like —

the way it turned me to stone and bone

and threw my sister against a wall,

that old blue house on Londerry Lane

where I once saw my mother cry.

But I only wanted to remember that

one spring I spent abroad,

diving into the cold rush of the river,

the way the water cut me to the bone —

I came up gasping for air, unheld,

skin pinned, without weight,

and felt nothing but renewal.

I thought maybe I was both.

Both memories guarded by a sacred wind

so fast and spurring they never the saw the other exist.

Two entities, infinitely swirling,

across a black construction paper sky,

not seeing the other though always knowing

that something else is there.