Psychopomp

Do you want to reach for the divine?

Start a dialogue with God?

Experience the static that forms

when you see the expression

behind a person’s expression?

Do you want to glimpse the ineffable?

I see it there,

hidden within the bramble and bureaucracy you’ve grown to protect yourself.

If I see you as God sees you then I’ve seen God.

Forgive me, I’m a race horse at the starting gate

the anxiety feeding itself in this transitory state

somewhere between liquid and solid.

Forgive me, I have seen my love without breath in his body.

I have been a psychopomp,

a perverse sort of midwife.

What this has carved out in me is now a cavern

the sides of my heart have been scraped out,

a baptism by fire.

A river will form a canyon and so will dynamite.

It’s more crude and the results less striking

and like anything violent that happens, it just happens.

Then again, a chasm is also capacity

a muscle tears so it can lengthen.

The hollowness feels like a hunger, it’s a burden, it’s a lightness, it’s a potentiality.

Let me fill the cavern with a different kind of violence.

I’m a psychopomp

I’ll cross the river Styx again

as many times as it takes

even though I know what I’m getting into, this time.

(Image credit: Mind and Memory, Janie Olsen)