I want to tell you everything.
I drank poison.
I deserted my son.
I did it for love.
I tried to drink god.
I opened my heart
And found only the knife
And the cold communion
Of the mystery in passage.

O, the myriad clutter
Of my mistakes.
My contrived ruin
And greed for the ineffable,
As if that equilibrium
Of crystal and flower petals
Were bankable,
Were I flame I could eat.

And this is a spell
To control madness.
Breath deep.
Repeat this.
I will survive.
I must.
To hear voices
Is not enough.
They must be orchestrated,
Taught technique.

It was not the men or women
I loved but the wild pulse
Of insanity.
I trusted it,
Thought it permanent
Like a congenital defect
Or a chemical reaction
Of moonlight and a certain
Type of skin. 

But it betrayed me,
Found someone younger
Who died better
And with more style.
Hang on.
I am absolutely certain.
I lived to tell you this
And only this.

Let your womanhood emerge.
Feel it beating, breathing.
It could rise from your shoulders
Like feathers or straw.
Trust it. Listen.
Save yourself.
The bruised dissolves
As it should, used up,
Exposes as small and obsolete,
A subspecies, inarticulate.
You shed it easy.

This is the moment
Of divinity and grace
Of which you have always dreamed.
This is the cradle, intact
In corridors without fraudulence
Or the deliberately deformed.
Not blood words
But something else,
More a flute than a drum
But equal in power,
Still able to haunt, kill
And transform.

Surrender.
Merge with this white square
Of April.
Make sacred what you touch.
Not history or events
But the details.
Yellow canna beside a lawn.
Dusk light across a redwood porch.

Your integrity is defined solely
By what you can hold,
Can press to your lips.
There is more immortality
In one perfect kiss
Than in the stones
Of pyramids.
Defend no borders
But those of sensibility. 
Be one woman truly, wholly
And you will be all women.
Tend one garden
And you will birth worlds.

From: Hurricane Warnings, poems.

Copyright 2005, Kate Braverman.