“What I’ve Become (A Cento All My Own)” by Barbra Nightingale
Here I am: the kind of woman
who slakes a thirst no longer dry,
casts pins to the wind though
nothing sticks to air.
I am black coal squeezed a lifetime.
My eyes diamond light.
I cannot look away,
wear you on my hand.
Your smile beamed photons
the night when the mercury
slithered like a black snake,
a night whose edge is never lost.
The wind comes in gusts of passion
haunted by ghosts; distance is irrelevant.
I am not dreaming, yet there are
trillions of miles—prowlers in an alien land.
Somewhere, someone drifts into sleep.
But dreams are not the only way of knowing.
I am dancing in moonface.
You do not know me this way.
Listen! You can almost hear the roar
of blood building a reef no tide can cross.
With each dry fall of a coconut,
we gaze fruitlessly at the plump sky.
As if dreams had meaning, as if gravity
didn’t exist, as if answers had a name.
Toward dawn, you can hear them as if lost in sleep.
The wind howls like a woman in love.
It is the heart beating through the night,
but there are complications:
Silence turned into thunder.
Words are no longer enough.
Have we become at last no more
than fractal images forming and reforming?
There always was something wrong in your brain,
some break in the synaptic pattern.
Once I used to type on an old Underwood.
Now my fingers stroke a keyboard.
I envision they fall like snow,
speaking a language long since gone to pebble.
This is for you and you and you.
I don’t like to remember, but to dream
is to surrender, give in and be lost
to love’s oblivious beauty.
I have waited a long time
in rainy orchards,
in spiral books where you are
what you were—I’m what I’ve become.
The only thing I’m sure of is the night sky.
One way or another we’re collapsing,
an empty space roiling its false calm.
Like you and I sizzling in the dark
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Barbra Nightingale Artist Statement:
I’m a writer. I have been writing poems (or they were writing me) since age 12. I wrote to make myself heard (in a family of 6, 4 of whom were male) if only to myself. I’m a retired English professor, EdD. I have 10 published books of poetry with small presses. From my father and brothers I learned to be strong, capable, and loud! I received many of my talents from my mother, who dabbled in occasional verse and instilled in me a love of reading. I have myself dabbled in other arts, such as painting and beading.
What does my writing/art mean to me? It means I have a voice that can be heard at will, with intention. Or not. To me, writing was never a choice; it just came out, and keeps coming out.
