How many times I’ve fallen

Only to return again to some stance

Believing the next more enduring than the last

Strengthened by the weight of repeated collapse.

Yet memory only draws us from ourselves

Distracting us so we fall as it claims to be our shield,

Speaking of the burning pain it held for us

As we moved into new moments.

Or, if we remained paralyzed,

Unable to withstand the mysterious beauty

That cradles our most impulsive footfalls,

It will insist it was there to comfort us

Whenever we yearned for some distant past:

Of how it revived for us, without question,

The sweet perfume of our favorite flower,

The whistle of our greatest joy

Or the chilling warmth of a rare summer breeze,

All to spare us the bottomless torment of our loneliness.

For nothing lies beyond it, our memory loves to say.

 

And when something new approached

Some moment in virgin color

How memory, feeling so threatened,

Would try to keep us from falling deeper into ourselves 

As we embraced that which lay beyond our imagining.

With cries of familiarity it would restrain us,

Insisting there lurked nothing new in the moment before us

Aside from a pain that would sink deeper inside our heart.

 

And how often we listened,

Enticed by a past that let us choose

To be forever clothed in long forgotten joy.

Yet in time that joy began to age

Its threads unraveled slowly as moments 

Crashed like waves upon its glass shore,

Until finally it shattered

And out poured the loneliness from which it blinded us—

For the joy was given form by the pain it denied

A pain which once traversed reveals our infinite beauty.