A series of survivable moments
is sometimes what constitutes a life.
Those, put down the rope and
step back from the ledge instants
with better instants attatched to them.
The necklace, a building circuit, spills out
like a string of imperfect gibbous moons
progressing slowly through their phases
one side visible, one side always concealed.
Nestled warmly right up against our skin
they are places where unspeakable beauty, mystery
and the unresolvable, raptly attennuated, resides.
Run the rosy tinted, creamy, glassy placid beads
over your enamel teeth, feel the sharp squeal
as their realness reverberates its diaphonic music
throughout the bones and sinews of your jaw.
These beautiful gleaming imperfect pearls
are the unbearable grains of painful sand
that we transit from sharp grit into smoothness.
Those brief hells which we daily encapsulate
to form a long and wearable necklace of years.
Every soul is a mother who bears its own life
over the narrow bridge of the seemingly untennable
safely through the valley of the deepest shadows
fearing all evil and yet somehow, against all odds,
living brightly, blithely and further on to tell the tale...
Lucy Meskill
image by John Crane Dower 1846/Museum of Photographic Arts Collections
