Unnameable

On some nights –           
and tonight might
be one of them –
the sadness feels
as though it belongs
to someone else,
was spun into a veil
and left here,
waiting for me
to come home in the evening
and be greeted by silence,
suddenly covered, caught
in this cobweb:

I wonder where you
came from, where you’re going,
what you’ve needed;
where the edge of permissible
lies; why you chose
to involve yourself,
how much I’ll hurt when you leave.

Some days –
and maybe today
is one of them –
I wake up
to the currents
of Time rushing on:
The not-enough and too-much
of it, how it stretches
out and doubles back,
swallows me again
and again
while slipping past.

Sometimes I wonder
if it’s fair to ask me
to be brave again,
to love recklessly,
without a hint of definition.
What does it mean, to unbox it?

Perhaps this is the deal
we’ve made, the bargain
struck between joy and sorrow,
the vow that’s taken
when you’re wedded to life
and the living of it.

Marla Dial Moore is a recovering journalist and writer who lives in San Antonio, Texas. She has written poetry peripatetically for more than 20 years. Her work has been published in recent years by San Antonio Arts Alive!, Voices de la Luna and Journal X.