POEM: The Feast Before the Forgetting
The Feast Before the Forgetting
Tonight I am light,
a moon that has learned to recognize its
face in slow and gentle water —
I smile, and the water smiled back.
The leaves speak in old dialect.
Animals call out to no one, or to everything.
My hands had been closed a long time,
open today like a door unlocked.
—
Your eyes come for me,
your leopard eyes simply here,
crouched in the golden grass of my life.
My fingers move across your face
like a woman reading the face of beauty itself—
she dreams in his language, not her own.
Oh you beautiful boy—
the full length of you.
To not have been met with such gentleness before —
that truth lives below my crown,
it curls in the oldest room of me,
pressing against what I have kept shut,
opening now
(this flower)
in the exact moment I choose nothing,
and everything chooses me.
—
You stand inside my dreams
your fire dancing still —
But who are you?
You don’t remember
how we played together
before all of this,
before our names,
before countries divided us
like a knife divides bread —
the white dice warm between our palms,
the wren singing its one small truth—
we sat beneath the jasmine that only blooms
after dark,
and the pomegranates that we split open on the feast table,
their seeds scattered garnets,
they are every word I would write for you in this life.
Later, beneath the quince tree,
you took what I offered
which is to mean I offered everything
which is to mean the tree bore witness
and did not look away.
—
You made a river of me.
You cast yourself inside the current —
swam the whole length of me —
and I kept you.
I held you in my streams
and I kept you.
I captured you in that other life.
I must have.
How else to explain this?
—
Where are you?
Why did you come in my darkest season
like a figure at the edge of the dunes,
neither arriving nor leaving —
a shadow becoming a boy
becoming the shape of something I almost recognize?
I came to you alone.
I have always come to you alone.
—
Who are you?
And then, at last, the only question
that contains all the others:
Where are you?
Oh, Beloved.
Marni Fraser
04-29-2026
Self Portrait with Jon. B. 2025
