A Wish For My-Chi
by Mick Roche
We must have existed before this mortal rending that we proceed gropingly
now as if by instinct alone; and nearly sightless, bleeding, torn, but
always toward the unassailable brilliance that roars inside everything we
desire but cannot name or touch. We watched th e evening burn itself copper and red into night by Hoan KiÍm
Lake. And though it was the pulp of our own blood that pooled scarlet into
the sky at dayís end w e called it beauty. Even the words we reached for tore off, and were jagged in the knowledge we
had lived another day out of ourselves as one might tear a page out of an
unfinished book to fuel the savage radiance that roars inside of things we
cannot name or touch. And so apart from all I canít say, for you who I will never know I might
wish a grace. Some making of love of a kind crafted out of flesh in the
fragile embrace of human words and hands that might fall and fold somehow
together on your cheek, or on your breast, to form a prayer finally out of
all this separateness. And then I would wish you lips, pressed so to your neck. So. Not for
ecstasy's sake so much, but in that one mortal kiss, to reach, and chance to
touch in all this exquisite tearing, some rare and unbear able kindness
that might heal, finally, what we cannot name.
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