Care II by Kate Light

Happy birthday, R., happy birthday, love.

Care II
Kate Light

I’ve sent you a poem; your first glimpse
of how, in that other world, I speak.
It is a life-line thrown to you, since
things have changed between us. Though I feel weak
wondering how you will be struck by this,
I’m strong with the sense of this new thing, this freak
version of me; because the poem, “Care”, is
one that came in a kind of trance—
which means I don’t know where it came from, or how
it moved itself from thought to thought, sequenced
without help of logic. All I did was allow
it. Yet it says what I know I want
to say to you: love’s a specter which haunts
the living back to life. You see, the peak
of it is not in the couplet ending,
the rhyme, the period; but in the sending.

—

From The Laws of Falling Bodies by Kate Light, published by Story Line Press, 1997.

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