Angels of the Get-Through

 

Angels of the Get-Through
Andrea Gibson

This year is the hardest year of your whole life.

So hard you cannot see a future, most days.

The pain is bigger than anything else.

Takes up the whole horizon, no matter where you are.

You feel unsafe you feel unsaved.

Your past so present you can feel your baby teeth.

Sitting on the couch, you swear your feet don’t reach the floor.

You keep remembering the first time you saw a bird’s nest.

Held together by an old shoe lace and scraps of a plastic bag

You knew the home of a person could be built like that

A lot of things you’d rather throw away

You keep worrying you’re taking up too much space.

I wish you’d let yourself be the milky way

Remember when I told you I was gonna become a full time poet

And you paid my rent for three years?

Best Friend,

Angel of the Get-Through.

All living is storm chasing.

Every good heart has lost its roof.

Let all the walls collapse at your feet,

Scream timber when they ask you how you are.

Fine is the suckiest word. It is the opposite of HERE

Here is the only place left on the map

Here is where you learn laughter can go extinct

And come back

I am already building the museum

For every treasure you unearth in the rock bottom

Holy vulnerable cliff

God mason, heart heavier than all the bricks

Say this is what the pain made of you

An open open open road

An avalanche of feel it all

Don’t ever let anyone tell you, you are too much

Or it has been too long

Whatever guards the feet on the bridge of a song

You are made of that thing

That unbreakable note

That photography of you at five years old,

The year you ran away from school,

Because you wanted to go home.

You are almost there.

You are the same compass you have always been

You are the same friend who never left my side

During my worst year

You caught every tantrum I threw

With your bare hands

Chucked it back at the blood moon

Said its okay, everyone’s survival looks a little bit like death sometimes

I wrote a poem called “say yes” while I was cursing your name

For not letting me go.

Best Friend, this is what we do.

We gather each other up.

We say, the cup is half

Yours and half mine.

We say alone is the last place you will ever be.

We say tonight lets stay inside reading Pema Chodron

While everyone else is out on the town

Pema will say “only to the degree we

Expose ourselves over and over to annihilation

Can that which is indestructible in us be found”

You’ll say Pema is so wise.

And I’ll say yes she is, and we are too.

Angels of the get through. We are too.