X AT THE THRESHOLD
Love & Death: Greatest Hits, with Joan Logghe & Miriam Sagan
Renée Gregorio

1
You fall in love with a stranger
to become someone else,
to take on the body of that voice
as your own.  Who is it?
Who is it?  The sound could be
a bird's cry.  It is so familiar.

Sometimes you can hear a voice's 
echo as much as you can the voice.
Go down into the body of that voice,
strange and friendly at once,
let it cover you, unmask you, give you
another shape.  Can the original
momentum of desire last?

2
There's part of us that knows
before language.  I speak in the tongue
of my ancestors, foreign words,
familiar island of hilltowns, tears
of my grandfather.

I am moving in and out
of a myriad of sensations
that have to do with space and growth,
with the song that is claiming my body.
I see myself running ahead
and myself in other clothes
staying behind.

I go back to the original momentum
of desire.  Kissing: a release from self-
definition, self-boundary, entering
the wave of the primitive breath.

It's a matter of shape.
There's more to grow into.
A matter of filling.

3
What's lost is childhood,
that urgency of play.
The voice of that earlier time.
I feel healed by that voice,
rich and round as a ripe peach.
It splits me.  The glove of it
circles my hand.  In it I believe
in the salvation of making.
The voice as gatekeeper.

Here, I try to be neither
scattered nor torn, but open
to the other voices.
I repeat history
like repeating a prayer
over and over
till its heard or answered.


©2011 Renée Gregorio