By Rebecca Tantony

You mention advancing light. I guess that’s what it means to have something become you. Like this morning writing in a garden and stopping as clouds reveal sun. Nothing fills you up like this; the chance of another moment. The arrival and return of answers.  The consideration of hope. 

In this light everything is known. The cat finds himself in a square of spring, the plants swallow substances, the body breaks apart. When it rains suddenly you angrily run inside. The thinness of the window offers reflection; the movement of a hand, a quick eye seen and then unseen, a pouting mouth. To grieve is to forget the water and instead become it. The glass is liquid now and you are lost in a memory of childhood. A Cornish holiday too wet for beaches. You play in the arcade instead, losing coins, hoping to win something soft to hold. You buy candy-floss and regret it immediately.

These past weeks you leave your body in the shower, then remember and climb back inside again. Always damp and tight, it takes a while to feel at home. But you do, come dusk. You scrub the sink, use cleaning products like they are going out of fashion and fashion is the two day old underwear you forgot to change. It is inevitable. Change that is. The movement of uncertainty is hard to undress from, yet ordinary and fitting at once. 

The rain stops. The sun starts apologising out of the window. You know it can’t be heard but a version of God is in the air, moving language where it needs to go. You feel clean after the downpour, the shower, the wet beaches of your childhood. Glowing almost, like the old body has left itself somewhere to grieve. You move newness back outside, sit afoot the garden and dissolve. Leaking and fluid, the day has not always been so kind, yet here you are floating now, without arm bands and gravity to rely on. You try swim through the patio and it works. The ground holding you up as you breaststroke, butterfly, dive. You flip onto your back, stretch and spin, expand as big as time. Over and over you increase, until the grief is a tiny part of all that you could be. The unknown day holds something of a possibility. That advancing light stops coming towards you and finally enters in.

Rebecca is a poet and writer singmymotherssong.com

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