Edith Speers: ‘Transparencies’

Transparencies

With you it always works like magic—
your absence is as potent as the dream of alchemy
but first I must seek you, send out my radar rays,
my silent sonar, into the infinite dimensions

until I find your eyes, the mirrors of my own,
warm with the same suffering,
and as mystified as I am, but wiser,
and patient of pain, tender toward wonders

then I must locate, among all the frequencies,
amid all the hum and crackle of conversations,
the wavelength we share uniquely, and amplify it
with the power of perfect love,

unencumbered by desires, naked of demands,
free of expectations, until we coincide
like transparent maps of the same country,
each with different details of roads and rivers;

until the elevations and depressions match up
and the coloured puzzle shapes of lakes and city limits
are connected and completed, and all the curving lines
never intersect because they are

almost concentric, sometimes parallel
and aligned in a common topology;
until the isobars of a lifetime’s climate
come together in one weather pattern;

until the single points of two separate existences
trace a two-dimensional portrait of one being;
until the diagram fills with spirit
and comes alive like a magic spell

where all the arcane secrets have been solved
the mystic symbols delineated like a mandala of sand,
with all the mantras and incantations chanted,
the rituals completed

and from out of nothing, and from out of nowhere,
the alchemical marriage is consummated.

Edith Speers