Stag's Leap

Something like a half-person
Left my young husband’s body,
And something like the other half
Left my ovary. Later,
The new being, complete, slowly
Left my body. And a portion of breath
Left the air of the delivery room,
Entering the little mouth,
And the milk left the breast, and went
Into the fat cuffs of the wrists.
Years later, during his cremation,
The liquids left my father’s corpse,
And the smoke left the flue. And even
Later, my mother’s ashes left
My hand, and fell as seethe into the salt
Chop. My then husband made
A self, a life, I made beside him
A self, a life, a gestation. We grew
Strong, in direction. We clarified
In vision, we deepened in our silence and our speaking.
We did not hold still, we moved, we are moving
Still - we made, with each each other, a moving
Like a kind of music: duet, then solo,
Solo. We fulfilled something in each other -
I believed in him, he believed in me, then we
Grew, and grew, I grieved him, he grieved me,
I completed him, he completed with me, we
Made whole cloth together, we succeeded,
We perfected what lay between him and me,
I did not deceive him, he did not deceive me,
I did not leave him, he did not leave me,
I freed him, he freed me.