Author’s Note: In recent years, I’ve developed a mild obsession with documentaries about people who are themselves obsessed with near-impossible physical feats—scaling the most forbidding mountains, surfing the tallest waves, climbing to the tippy-top of the world’s highest buildings, and so forth. I’ve come to understand that their brains are wired differently from the rest of us, especially with respect to risk perception. This poem reveals my preoccupation with these different perceptions, knowing that every moment on that mountain brings a potentially life-altering decision.
Alive. Not alive.
Twinned splotches on the common timeline,
the truth in my bones now because I met you,
bore witness to your demonstrations
of how time folds on itself, on you,
how a tilting crust of snow-ice is a face of time,
putting on a show,
thermodynamics at play,
bodies in motion, stay in motion,
bodies at rest…
I would not know this, but for the way you order life—
ending as you begin, with us, not with us—
opposite states as paired truths.
Your heart beating, not beating.
Your eyes open, a camera shutter open to
record earth’s sweeping curvature punctured by
jagged peaks in de-oxygenated air.
Your eyes close, you crumple in peace, maybe in pieces,
beneath a particular snow-ice shelf eternally
ready to envelope you in a permafrost embrace.
You teach me that sequentialism is an illusion,
never this then that, but this and that, entwined
like lovers refusing to part.
You teach me that tragedy is a choice, not an inevitability,
given joy’s concurrent clamor for attention.
You unleash the possibility of quantum superpositionality—
an object in two places at once until it’s measured.
Are you, then, yet to be measured?
Or are you unmeasurable?
You never leave because you never truly arrive:
instead, omnipresent – belonging to continuity itself,
to the unending atomic swirl,
belonging to the vertical mountain face that embraces your callused fingers,
forever fondling, forever seeking the grip that pins you in place
against unyielding rock hurtling you upward,
outward, toward the endless supply of time’s snow-ice shelves.
From you I learn:
I too live and cease to live even now—
I too am yet to be measured,
a dancer waltzing across an endless floor,
the unspeakable and the ineffable keeping the beat,
my letter to you a consciousness older than
the jagged bed of scree that receives and releases you
at once and always.
Amy L. Bernstein writes stories that let readers feel by making them think. She is the award-winning author of seven books, including, most recently, Tent City, a family saga about the decline of the American Dream; and Wrangling the Doubt Monster: Fighting Fears, Finding Inspiration, a popular source of encouragement for all self-doubting creatives. Amy brings a compassionate and insightful voice to the challenges and joys of the artistic process at writers’ conferences around the U.S. A former journalist in print and public radio, as well as a produced playwright, Amy also runs a book coaching business, helping nonfiction authors craft compelling book proposals. Learn more at www.amywrites.live.
