Jared Carter

Ritual

Look on this imperfect man
who holds you in his arms,
and hearken back in time

to ancient grief – a ritual
made strange by suffering
and all it can bestow.

I have the scars to show
when I was five days old
my flesh was snipped away –

a band of skin they claimed
I would no longer need.
Thus to invisibility’s ring

they gave an extra turn.
I came to know the press
of blade against my pulse

before I had the words
to weep, or wonder why.
And after healing, when

I touched that absent place,
mistaking it for pleasure,
it was not hard to grasp

some mystery was gone.
None of them guessed
the ways loss can linger,

or how one who comes
bearing a caul always
carries that shadow –

nor could they fathom
that longing at nightfall
for limbs become phantom

and selves that are real –
that hunger for knowing
what will be lasting

and what cannot stay.
Now, when we hazard
these ghosts on this bed,

our risk has the power
to make us complete –
the instant your need

re-encircles my loss,
we enter that legend
of grace in extremis –

the caul as pure rescue,
the faith of the sailor
cast out on the deep,

abandoning all and yet
in that same moment
borne up by the urgent sea.

Diamond

Diamond was it that I wanted – hard,   
Inviolable, and neither pith nor shard,
No fragments lost and reassembling –
            rather, fire fierce and trembling.

Scintillation inward led me seeking
Symmetry beyond causality’s stone –
Far from entropy’s incessant creeping,
            separate from depths of bone.

Brilliance beckoned with its clear and lasting
Unobtainability.  Each step
Revealed a new abyss.  Still fasting,
            starved, I understood.  And leapt.