Pressure
by Sarah Jane Souther
The pressure of a thought
Before expression
A subtle communication
Hidden until explosion
A moment swollen
Like a breath
Before a scream
Sometimes I dream
of breaking
Just splitting
Some interior seam
I wonder if I’d bleed
Or is that kind of explosion
Really implosion
Am I always so
contained within myself
Do some kinds of blood,
instead of seeping
Simply circulate
Is there purpose outside
my own self-consciousness?
This question, rhetorical
I ask only to cross examine myself
Purpose found me
already
Long before I started looking for it
It visited me in the blackness of a womb
it held me,
My small fingers growing
And as they grew
curling
Around the hands of God
Did I doubt love then
Like I do now
Or in that time that precedes memory
Did I believe
That existence was a kindness
So much older now
So old and wise I tell myself
As I look at life and it’s cruelties and
Saying, ignorantly
These are the most true things
That horror and disappointment
win the daylight
And the night
And the sunrises and the dusks
And we are all going back to dust anyway
But I don’t believe this
After all
Here I am
Writing and wrenching
Hope from every embrace, every
Blade of grass in the park
Every baby smiling on the subway
Because I know
I could so easily split it all
With a razor blade
And I don’t say this to say
I wish for death
Only to acknowledge the thinness
Of life
Staring back at me
From the blue veins in my wrists
What keeps us here spinning on a sphere?
More than gravity I mean
What keep us choosing beginnings
And beginning again
Over endings
I look at God and my voice surprises me when I say
“Where else could I go?
You have the words of life.”
I thought these words
would come from my mouth
reverently,
like a song
Instead they come strangled
A cry to the dark
As if, at this point,
I almost wish
there was a different explanation.
An easier one.
And the goodness of God
Was more like the feeling
Of a cool cloth to the forehead
Than the touch of a surgeon
Scalpel to skin
And the lancing of the wound
And the draining of the hope
That was false but felt good
And I wanted it
Anyways.
But then again
Why was I so content with blisters?