Middle...

She walks in beauty, like the night
Of cloudless climes and starry skies;
And all that’s best of dark and bright
Meet in her aspect and her eyes…

We met one day, in anger, and she cried. Her life in endless turmoil, she taught me mine was still worth the living, and I took to that like a man should, my Middle child, half-grown, ever in need of a hug and a kiss, and a hand up the rough slope. She took my hand and thought that it was me helping her when in fact she saved my life more than once. And now she needs me again, but this time I cannot pull her up. She has her feet firmly on the ground and though it might shake, it will not move and she can walk on her own and find her way through dark, moonless night, out of a forest she loved in the day, but that can seem so scary in the dark.

She needs a light, and stars just don’t light the way.

You see, she’s fond of complicating her life; we all do—but she’s a master at it. She’s like the obstinate child who, no longer happy just to put the puzzle together, insists on doing so with all the pieces facing down. She’s the cinnamon in my coffee—hold the sugar.

One day, she will meet A Man, and he will hold her hand, but not her heart, and she will find wide roads for them to walk, cool breezes and tall trees, love like the love of friends, but not. She will find with him what she cannot find with other men far closer, a safe distance that will keep her from falling, falling into a pit, falling into love. It’s not that love is, in and of itself, a bad thing, but some people are not ours to love, and that is a terrible thing to find out. She will not have him. She’ll crave him, crave his breath, the sound of his breath, the beating of his heart on her cheek. She and he will want nothing but that, but love refuses to be “nothing but that” and it grows—oh! vaster than empires, but more slow.

And there will I be, to keep her tears from hitting the ground, because one ought never to hold them back, but the ground is undeserving. I will hold them in my hand till they, like sighs and prayers float away into the distant clouds, bright and white, distant , incorporeal and free—foreign.

One cold and distant night we’ll embrace each other warmly under the Portland sky and cry together for what might not yet have happened, but must. And it must, oh child! It must. At the end of the day, the sun sets—Yehoshua doesn’t live here anymore.

And she whose name we won’t say now will not say thanks—and I won’t say thanks—and the world will go on just like it always does, from west to east, so fast we cannot feel it.

And in the dark, I’ll call her name. I might not be able to go into that forest and take her out, but I can cry into the dark her name, only her name, over and over.

Blind eyes could blaze like meteors and be gay.

You’ll need no light to find your way. Wherever you come out, I’ll be there.