Christian Anton Gerard
I’m always telling myself, remember
to eat, remember your face needs soap
at least every day, remember your heart
is a muscle the mind’s made a metaphor
for everything you feel. There is argon for that
moment–light like me in love–
all electrode and flux and steel.
The welding mask’s dark glass is what cries
during the cutting of raw onions. That glass
between the eye and the arc. There is a way
to meld so there is one metal and there’s
a way to make it seem so. The only way to really see
the sun is unflinching, to see it burned in your eye
as you look and blink and look. I’m saying it’s the same,
me in love, if you’re willing to lift the welding mask’s
glass so action and reaction are light. You listen to me
speak in circles. Seeming is less than adequate for the heart.
Seaming, though, a different story. Sometimes I cry
thinking of the way you listen because you listen like that.
Every onion I’ve peeled to its core is always onion at its core.
I don’t want to be onion to my core. I want to be
a thing that has become another thing. Speak of me
in the possessive. Let’s look right at us and come away always
the other, always risking our sight to see coalescing heat.