Magician's Wife

The clouds are white,
the snow, the mist, the snow,
white upon white upon white.
It is mist looking back,
mist we are walking into,
the world seems intangible.
But your face -
strong, calm, almost grim.
My most familiar face,
my most beloved face,
and oh the grief that I feel
at the old age your burden has wrought on it.
This wet, heavy, unforgiving light
reveals all your pain
but oh how I love seeing your face so clearly.

My horrible folly
of contempt, resentment
for your perceived weakness
at my weakest hour.
Yet when I stop wanting, trying,
fall into myself,
am at your mercy,
you are infinite care and gentleness

like I were a rice paper flower,
a bud on a cherry tree,

Willy Pogány

a lost, scared willow bird

I am not worth
of being treated
like a delicate, soft being
knowing the cold pride and arrogance
that taint me.
Yet you do.

You seem solid now, and I can
cling onto your arm
as much as I dare
but what if after that next
bend in the road
I were alone, again?
Like you stepped off the train and I
am carried along with a tremendous,
unstoppable momentum,
hurtling to where the memory of
each other must be lost forever.

Is this the defining moment?
Or is it this? Or that?
Where is the brink and how do we
know we've stepped off it?

The pain of walking from mist to mist
where the answers are only pinpricks of light
like fireflies or almost forgotten hopeful dreams.
Here my strength cannot depend on your brilliance,
my peace cannot lean on your awakening.
Oh Eternal Mother, it is true!
I must let him go!
If I yearn to be the ocean and the tree
that support him,
I must let him
and when we are apart
and when I sing
from my austere loneliness,
it is in him that the strength grows
and me, who learns to love better.