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Coma, Awakening

by Ken Meisel

When the dream awakens & the sleeping coma is no longer present, the self finds an awakening –

its love revelation – in the other. & maybe all this happens at a simple restaurant & the couple is

serving one another a hot dish of something & she’s there, pouring him his wine & he’s

smiling, receiving it, & now they are feeding one another spoons of food, & suddenly he’s

looking intently into her eyes, just to see her; & what he sees then, also, is himself, what he’s

meant to be to himself & to her & to them, as if the future, that open water, is here; & time

is the cellophane boundary that is pierced. & the coma is just the remembering of the other

right now as the other that was always inevitable. & maybe love is that portal. & so the couple

preserves it, that portal; & they build an entire world inside it, so they can always move

through it, like dance steps down a dancehall. &, just what is the coma, awakening, if not

just this remembrance of one another, inside the cellophane boundary that time has pierced?

She said to me: “let’s stay young inside this, forever.” Wasn’t that the first vow? & I said –

& just with my eyes because I didn’t have the words for it yet – “it is a fervor that gives its

self to another so that what was once solid, becomes porous & a makeshift for another’s

life.” & didn’t Gilbert say, in one of his poems, that the spirit – inside the self – is, in fact,

something voiceless flying lovely, over an empty landscape? Yes, her eyes said back

to me, that is what love is: “it is the coma, awakened, that the lover flies so emptied

over a lovely landscape, into the homestead of another.”

Ken Meisel is a poet and psychotherapist, a 2012 Kresge Arts Literary Fellow, a Pushcart Prize nominee and the author of eight books of poetry. His most recent books are: Our Common Souls: New & Selected Poems of Detroit (Blue Horse Press: 2020) and Mortal Lullabies (FutureCycle Press: 2018). He has a new book, Studies Inside the Consent of a Distance forthcoming in 2022 from Kelsay Books. Meisel has recent work in Concho River Review, I-70 Review, San Pedro River Review, The Wayfarer and Rabid Oak.

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