Within

An invisible bell, 

crafted in an instant and yet, 

as old as our first meeting,

fell silently through a clear 

but clouding sky and landed

over me, sealing me in place,

effectively freezing me 

in position so that I could not move,

could not speak, could not do other

than simply be stunned into

silent inertia by the raw power

of something I had never felt 

the icy bite of before. Words have always

been weapons, but I endured

insults from the playground

on up without tears and trembling;

I was called a faggot more often 

than an actual gay person. You, though,

with five words - I later thought of you

as David, whose five smooth stones

felled a giant - caused the traffic

to stop, the birds to fall from the sky,

the sun to become enwrapped in

gauze so thick its light, even to this day,

is not so bright to me. What was taken

was only partially mine, and even

less partially known, but it may not 

have been the words themselves but the smile

that embraced them as they fell from your

lips that split open my forehead,

letting loose not some fully-formed Athena,

but a swaddled misery, and yet around the

edges of the wound, a crystalline hope, 

a dawning realization that you actually

performed a small mercy, though you surely

would not see it as such; because what

child born to a mother who with

calculating indifference can say

I gave myself a miscarriage

is most certainly doomed, and

so still entrapped though with more and more

freedom, though never less sadness and

never a diminishment of the cup of sorrow,

I hold sometimes, when I am alone,

a weightless grief the size and shape of

a phantom child, growing with years

to become almost lissome and true,

my small and selfish gesture, more unbearable

to me than any long and lingering dying,

because he (it was a boy, you were careful to tell)

was never able to fight against it. My arms 

to cradle, my voice to lull, my eyes to 

trail over symmetrical forms, my heart to beat

once, 

        for the not knowing of you

twice,

        for the not knowing of us

three times,

        for the not knowing of what comes after

and then to stop.