Archeology of the Self

What visitors see
is the withering.
Is this me in ten years?
Dad acts out our undoing.
We’re taking notes, some of us.

One wants to fixate
on the tumor and the
wasting and the fact
that Dad sleeps with his eyes
open—that’s not a good sign.
God, he sleeps so much
these days.

Old friends funnel in and
out of the sickroom, milling
close to the door, minding
the invisible force field
around the bed.
Breathing only through their
mouths, they stare
out the window because
as far as they can tell, nothing
outside is dying.

Dad’s moaning throbs
somewhere in our own bodies,
the way a tuning fork sounds
its tonal correlates.

We’ve decided
that this is failure.
This is how we
let go of the wheel
and careen head-on
into fate.
Dad says there is still
important work being done.

Impossible.

Where is the good
in protracted suffering?
By whose standards
are purulent sores
meaningful?

This looks like decline,
says Dad from his death throne.
The process appears unduly
corrosive, I know.
But look closer girl…this…this
is an excavation through my self.

The ruins are obvious enough.
That the work of digging and sifting
is difficult and tedious, is apparent.
You see how dirty it is. How
back-breaking. You notice
debris piling upon debris.
But Daughter, this is
the only way depth
can be attained.

The only way.

Here, in this silty midden
is evidence of repeated cataclysm
and rebuilding. You see that?
Trowelling and tunneling,
I crumble into myself
overjoyed, imagining
a grotto—and finally,
there is discovery.

Days of sinking into
yet more sinking, rewarded
at last with landing
upon a seminal structure, a foundation.
Today I have unearthed something original.

Under strata of ego and duality,
beneath layers of separation and fear,
and webbed in a matrix of light
dazzles a flint of soul.
And girl, would you believe
that after all these years,
it still works.