Surrendered

(For T, and anyone who has chosen to love completely, despite the consequences. I wrote this after one of my most disastrous relationships.)


I can trace my unbroken, headlong fall
not from the first unforgotten moment
I saw your face, but from a point removed
farther in time, higher in hope, daring
to court a disaster more vast than any
before. No, my fall began when first I
said simply, I will not withhold myself.
Costly philosophy; as mankind knows
well; the ability to choose freely
was merely borrowed from divine image,
our heady inheritance. Even so,
I choose not to fear the serpent's bite, to
take in my own hands life as a live coal;
capable of burning both the bitter
and the beauty from the souls of those who,
fearful of timidity, thirst for unfettered being.
Not merely sensation, not passing
fancy or a fickle call of passion;
but the unpredictable potential
for fulfillment and havoc equally.
The soul thus expanded by a grief more
heavy than gold's viscous elixir can
now resonate with every octave life
can play upon one, a sound limitless
enough to move in time with this planet's
swing around the centered sun, and add in
harmony one note- humble and small in scale-
but, indelible, a part of all the
singing of the stars whose voices ring
out in eternal dark, reaching with their
fingers of light to fall on simple me,
transforming my abandoned falling to
a flight luminous with surrendered grace.