Knowing

Knowing  

“If I feel physically as if the top of my head 

were taken off, I know that is poetry.”

Emily Dickinson (1870)

Like when an ice-cream headache makes you believe

you might actually succumb to cardiac arrest,

right there at the supper table in front of everyone,  

and think how funny that would be, 

but can’t muster a giggle for the pain. 

Or when I feel as if my identity was just stolen

in a dream, or my bank account emptied 

in the middle of the very early morning  

during some great unexpected coastal storm

that swept everyone I’ve ever met out to sea. 

Every time my mother threatened to snatch up 

my ponytail and cut it off while I napped on the couch.  

When you stand too closely to abstract art, maybe

seeing only one or two familiar colors, knowing 

there’s so much more, then being called away, turn 

and walk with your back to the wall too quickly to see the rest 

of what was happening, but knowing that’s okay. 

Like when the train horn sounds in the next town

over the mountain and only you bother noticing,

but you don’t mention it to your friends 

and it stays with you the rest of the afternoon 

until the bar noise drowns it out. 

Like when the hairs of your arm stand on end 

the instant a future lover walks casually 

over where they’ll bury you. That’s when I know.  

-Larry Thacker