In the Dark I Live

by Mel Waldman

In the dark I live within a mansion of many secret rooms. I hide — perhaps I died — and I believe no one can find my home. No one can come to sacred ground, and I shall never be found.

Nor can I penetrate my lost soul, for it is buried deep beneath the snow in the lacerated landscape of my private madness. G-d bless my missing soul and illuminate the mystery of my psyche.

No one shall know or betray me; no one shall violate my being; no one shall see who I am but I, for in the dark I live.

And yet, as I proclaim my inaccessibility, as I mock the outer world of the other, you come to me courageously. You come from far away and enter my home not by frenzied force or fierce penetration but by the softness of love: a soothing zephyr that brushes my face and opens my soul.

You come to me with the miracle of love, and we meet in an invisible universe that no one has seen and only the blessed have known.

We meet and vanish at dawn, when a golden sun rises in the east before the beasts awaken and growl at the glorious galaxies far away, for they are creatures suspicious of all things unseen.

Yes, we meet and vanish at dawn, merging and fusing in a phantom metamorphosis, becoming a ghostly being born after divine union at the beginning of time before sin, before the darkness that once consumed me.