Keep Smiling
Mar 22nd, 2008 by Ree Joy
Keep smiling; stay away, you don’t
have to speak a single word,
don’t spoil the lovely nights I worship
when I’m not hurting.
Don’t speak to me
about things you haven’t found
the courage to leave well enough
alone;
it’s way easier
to quit smoking when you’re sick,
harder still to forgive yourself
when you have no one beside you
you trust enough to practice
forgiveness on.
Trust, it’s a gift, until you fail it;
don’t you remember,
we seemed much younger then;
how, having not had it before, having
not done it before, how failure -
love felt so impregnable -
seemed incredulously
impossible?
Still, your hands were the first
to ask, I believe, and then your lips
insisted I dare not say no; pacts, body-wise,
and promises, made in silence, are ever
easier in the breaking.
Don’t speak to me about things you
haven’t found the courage to forgive yourself for;
trust me, instead, as if I really cared,
trust me as if a path of least resistance
somebody else offers in lieu of lies you haven’t
invented yet were a godsend,
trust me as if nothing you do will ever
take away
my own ability to cry down
my own questions, as if your answers,
down to the most pathetic detail,
were enough to keep me
breathing.
Speak to me, instead, of how you
have never forgotten, if you have them,
and how you’ve learned to fail better.
Give me your ghosts, teach me your fears
until they become my own, and then,
having been so freed, you can
save me
from yourself.
Let us then, in mutual grief,
in the long, long afterwards,
when all our last resorts are, at last, exhausted,
trust each other to death, still,
more so than the conversations we held
each other with,
not even when you were in me,
and I in you,
and if, all things being equal, we don’t annihilate
each other, again, at last,
in other words (always banal in hindsight),
we might just find ourselves, or whatever’s left,
even if only in forgiveness.
Keep smiling, love the one
you’re with, they say,
I say,
and don’t speak anymore;
not even your hands, imagined now,
can call me back to try again,
not even possibility.
Some gifts, like mountains, are just
that much harder to give, that much harder
to climb, the second time
around.
