In a flash

For you. You know who you are.

he reads me,                                                                                                                                     but not like a book.

books levy their                                                                                                                              slow tax on time:                                                                                                                            exacting                                                                                                                                                a split second per word,                                                                                                                     a half minute for half a page,                                                                                                             a quarter hour to sketch city spires or heathered moor,                                                          ten hours, ten days, ten weeks, all withholding the revelation of why

but he sees me                                                                                                                                     all at once,                                                                                                                                         like a surgeon reading an x-ray –                                                                                             bright nerves sprawled across a dark field,                                                                         swollen, wounded parts                                                                                                                   my translucent hands                                                                                                                        try to hide,                                                                                                                                       the cracks, wispy as cobwebs,                                                                                               filigreed through my bones

or like a man in a watchtower                                                                                                      who knows precisely                                                                                                                        the location of the fleeing prisoner                                                                                               and snaps on the circle of searchlight                                                                                           the moment the lock is about to give way                                                                                  and escape seems inevitable

in times when I am patient or prisoner,                                                                                   when I am weeping or hungry or exhausted,                                                                        unable to control the masks                                                                                                         that present me to the world,                                                                                                         he sees what is broken                                                                                                                  and will not look away.

there is some small pain in being seen,                                                                                          in being looked so thoroughly through –                                                                                      the faintest echo of formulated Prufrock,                                                                          wriggling and pinned to the wall

yet some slow, persistent grace                                                                                           preserves me from despair;                                                                                                 whispers the lesson                                                                                                                            so hard to learn                                                                                                                                but necessary as breath                                                                                                                   in a body of two:

that seeing is also shaping,                                                                                                      lighting is also loving, and –                                                                                                            surely he knows –                                                                                                                         love may indeed bare all things,                                                                                                     as we suffer ourselves                                                                                                                      to be seen