Consumed in Conversation
by R.J. Tierney
It went something like this:
We sat sideways on stools, drinks by our hands
like two ancient rulers struggling to find a middle ground
between subsumption
and the isolation of deprivation —
two opposites fascinated by foreign facets
of talamh nua, of terra nova —
and not greed but desire laced the breaths we passed back and forth
as we sought to understand each other the way light and dark try
to wrap around the same world from different sides.
With every word we explored
all the ways light can be bent over
and over beneath the securing weight
of darkness. Our discovery? Separation is the most
acute suffering, a numbness, not death
but worse. After all, a little death
stimulates life like breath.