Ascension
Ascension/// a poem by Gigi
Ascension,
We were headed for something then,
a direction that felt almost certain
You could feel the uneasiness, but there were no words to describe it
The city was flush with complications, contradictions,
Sharp movements of jaggery time,
that were woven through
steeple bodies on sidewalks and escalators
Conference halls of round circle glances of “hey who are you, i am, who i am”
Council chambers rubber stamp
Foreboding signs of permits and changes,
A freefall that fell through each breezeway and annex,
Restaurant and esplanade,
Lobby and elevator corral
The times in between for exhalation, inhalation,
Ok.. bilasten for my breathing, budesonide for my lungs,
do i feel it now, maybe that's it, slightly deeper breath
Fibrous walls i can picture them inside me,
in, out
Grasping to reach up, up
Maybe I need to stretch a little more.
Easier to say was
The weight on my chest
To the doctor, the other doctor,
The x-ray tech, the pharmacist, the counsellor, the worried friend
Easier was the excuse for the coughing, the gasping for breath
We have never imagined a world beyond this one
because there is no frame of reference for what could come next,
only a thought from the world before it
scaffolded by the hopes for a cure.
That means that our dreams are confined,
Weighted by the inescapability of the reality we knoweven those dreams of a truly new start,
without the buzzing tiredness of the news at 11 wake up at 7,
Those dreams of going back to the town and working at the cafe or pumping gas
A new name embroidered on the uniform shirt
or of cliff diving from the tetering edge of the Bank of Montreal skydeck with trays of uneaten catering tied to each leg.
I wrote three poems then
About the crime of reality
A smoking cigarette
Of each air
Of each nature
Breathing in deep the
Hit
Did it end with the virus?
When the streets emptied
And the sky came down
And the silence swept through its passage
The lights were on in the towers
The screens beamed their messages
The windows showed their wares
Did it end with the virus?
The emails The video conference The typing and texting Concerns, confusion
Pronouncing each new second in time
Longer than ever, longer than each before
“What will come, what will come, what will come!”
Did it end
When it seemed like there was nothing left to say
Or do
Or be
Ascension is the drama of our life,
A play of god and of fates in magnificent theatre
Where illuminated becomes
A death so shocking and disrupting that it is impossible to mourn
Grief swept, bereft, broken in two
A shattering of reality, of expectations, of what is willed
The fates bring in to balance with fences buried and broken
Birthed from this now arrives from the goddess’ womb
a new name in each of us,
That in absentia of the ancient, a new meaning can unfold
The cruelty of the fates live in our reaction, tied to each strung finger above
Like seafarers having travelled and returned, with no news of the change
Our expectations hold to memories lived and known
Seeking less the impossibilty of desires and dreams
For the bossom of the old Christ ascends, to show us
That what we seek requires of us letting go