POEM: ARDENT

ARDENT

I was ardent once.

A small fire keeping another fire.

I would have laid my body down

like a coat over broken glass —

like love over the mouth of a grave.

I was gullible in the old way.

Open-faced.

Certain kindness meant kindness.

Certain hands arrived without hidden plans.

I carried my heart lit inside me

like a paper lantern in black weather,

swaying,

convinced the wind was not wind.

Then came the careful theater of masks.

The hand extended and the door already closing.

My longing dragged across a red door

not meant for opening.

It is a particular cruelty —

to call someone toward you

only for exile at the door,

to hold a candle to a woman's face

and study her warmth

while standing fully in the cold.

I waited—

translated silence into promise

(as if desperation will ever bear fruit.)

There is a bird that keeps its song

past the falling day —

not because of its courage

but because it has forgotten

what the silence means.

I was that bird.

And why —

why speak my name like it is precious,

why press tenderness into the pit of my heart like a key

to no lock,

why bring me to the threshold

of every room I was not allowed to enter?

There are defeats constructed long before arrival.

Walls that look like welcome

until you are inside them.

Still you led me.

And still I followed —

light in my hands,

throat full of salt water.

Now I move through the days

weighted only by this:

how long I stood in that light,

how long to let myself be seen

by someone who had already

turned away from the window.

Marni Fraser

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