Wall – Ian McMahan

Let me live on that wall.

Let me walk amongst its letters like trees:

Tall above my head, colored with the one truth.

 

I am often confused,

But not beside the childish print of your hand:

Impromptu yet wholly monumental.

 

The wind blows.

The breeze often flutters those pages:

Held together by red and blue thumbtacks,

Nearly but never falling off—

The eternal impermanence.

 

So often I am uncertain,

But never with the sight of a playbill:

Thrusting me back to a December evening.

 

You said you are the moon—

And I, like the sun—that I burn bright while you wane,

That we need promise in this world, and light, and that

Somehow I am these things.

 

Well I say that when this eclipse ends,

When Helios and Selene must part as they have for centuries—

That we will gyrate and sway and dance on our path:

Parallel in purpose and in feeling.

That we will not cry or fight or swear, but

Laugh and smile and remember.

 

Apart, yet celestially certain to pass again.