To My Fears

 Robert Creeley wrote, “I think I grow tensions/like flowers."

 I say the same about fears.

They are lovelier than I would have imagined.

My fears seem delicate, almost translucent. I think I can see through them as I walk around the day. I think they are just veils or screens, that I can still see the shapes on the other side: my son, his 15 years; my dad, his lungs; my baby grandniece, the world she’s growing into. They are all there, it seems, just out of reach, just far enough away so that if I called to them, my voice would dissolve just before it reached them.

But fears aren’t veils or screens and I’m not seeing through them. They’ve grown slowly wild around me. They are prehistoric, coded in my DNA, oddly particular in their fragrance. They are hypnotic. And it’s not other people I see; those are the fears beyond the fears, the fears growing behind the fears, the viney weave crawling up a trellis.

What is there to do but pick them? This one is pain. This one is death. This one, that I never existed. This one, that you never cared. Or that you did. And then you didn’t.

I will dry them and press them between the pages of the dictionary. I will smother them with words I never learned taken from languages I’ve never heard. And then, later, I will send them in cards, letting them speak for the tensions we carry.