I didn’t think to … did you?
I just held back from just falling in, spinning
fingers out to find fingers in the dark-spool night,
from twisting together a twining moment
that would have now passed, wound up
as other things but
spun
passed
gone.
It’s not past.
It’s barely present.
It’s the first fuzz on the edge before skin is skin.
In fact it’s before that.
It’s somewhere in the whispers, in the faint shape sounds
of that before place where things begin,
where they begin to begin,
where they aren’t yet
and aren’t certain
and aren’t yet certain to be anything more
than what they already are which is nothing, really
but something nonetheless.
I am nonetheless wiser … and it’s soft, this winding slow;
standing at shifting shorelines, skin boundaries
that we might gently move towards,
that we might slowly
sink
into
thinking about
more
deeply
… that we might thin into a long string of strung out moments within
the skin of the question of the skin of our questioning skin …
Might we hold onto this holding, before the folding in.
before before was first published in Poetry d’Amour 2020 anthology, WA Poets, Mulla Mulla Press
submissions for Poetry d’Amour 2022 are open until 27 May.
visit WA Poets here for more info.
photo credit: Vraj Shah
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