A kind of forgiveness

                                                "​For the purest sound,you can’t sing at the notes;
                                                             you have to sing through them."

There were nights I said yes
when I didn’t want to say yes,
nights my body floated above itself
and didn’t come back.

I like to imagine where I went instead.
Maybe wandering the city.
Maybe folded, tiny, into a watch
ticking deafening ticks. Maybe
I just went home.

But you have to do the work, they say,
if you’re going to do the work. So let
the body return and work:

There were nights I said yes
when I didn’t want to say yes.
Nights I opened my safest parts
to hands that would steal them
and helped pack the boxes.
To say it happened this way is,
in itself, a kind of forgiveness.
The body returns and I tell
the stories: the nights I said yes,
the nights I stayed, the nights
I did not.

I saw them recently, the hands.
They looked like hands, like
my hands. No claws. Things happen
and then they don’t anymore,
and leaving them behind, too,
is a kind of homecoming.

The body comes back into itself,
the work begins, something else
truly ends.

There were nights I did not
get to say no.

When I think of them now,
they’re a row of watches on a table,
all the batteries dead, all telling
the same time,
​
none of them today.