Inside

August 2000

INSIDE

(My response to someone commenting on my lack of ability to make eye contact.)

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Please don’t look at me.

I’m not what you think you see.

There’s less here than you can believe.

I can’t look at you.

My eyes might not lie…

They might just reveal

that thing my soul needs most

To conceal.

Over there.  Not here.

Here is too close.

Look where I’m looking –

There’s your safe place.

Watch me from a distance

While I guard this space.

I know that you feel like

You’re missing something now –

But there is nothing to miss.

There is nothing where

You would look anyhow.

It is best this way.

Perhaps you will imagine well.

Better, it is, for you to believe

There was something there–

Than to look and see

There was nothing at all!

And if you looked and you saw

There was nothing to see –

Don’t you see?

That is why I hide.

You can pretend there were

Great and Beautiful things–

If you could see them–

Inside.

A Safe Place

The wind blowing in the prairie grass

is like the sound of the whisperings

of a thousand angels’ fervent prayers.

I love to stand there, absolutely still,

and listen to the breeze move

in waves across a sea of grass.

Sometimes I find a place where a deer has lain down

— hidden away and sleeping;

so I lie there too and I imagine

I know what the deer knows:

that I am in a secret place.

I am safe.