Epiphany

Shikhandin

The times you clung to that crag on night’s cliff,

waiting for dawn. Dripping like blade cut flesh into that

day when you sensed a wild reverberation within

your heart strung up from the dizzying heights, salivating

at life which looked like an ant line far below you, passing

into the horizon. Passing, passing. You never realized

the shrills of your commitments, that syrup thick sense

of unctuous fulfillment, your temple glinting in the sun

you’d counted stars during those long unbending years. Those

pretty tinsels you had loved so hard, tarnished now, and 

your dreams conserved in wax-sealed jars. A dirge circled

and your bones turned to salt. Time’s weight, like the piles

of old magazines in the rag-and-bone man’s cart. When

suddenly, in the midst of it all, there came the sting. Yes,

the sting of incomprehensible tears. Even then

you did not comprehend, not fully. Until

you felt its tug on your calloused hands, and

the skirts of a new and bustling day, humming sweetly

to itself. Desperate to ride the land, you clawed

at everything in sight—the mist, the light, the air, the treble

of a bird singing somewhere. But what you held

in your supplicant hands was the dust of the crag you had

once so loyally embraced. But you are alive still. And so

is time and breath and your jam-jarred dreams. All

it needs is a flick of your wrist to open.