sometimes survival asks
the very thing
you spend a lifetime
escaping

not courage
not certainty
but the unclenching

there are griefs
that keep their vigil
at the edges of your years
patient as sediment
until you tire
of every pilgrimage
around them

i mistook healing
for the slow craft
of growing less breakable

now i consent

i let what waited
resume its passage
through the chambers
i kept barred against it

my heart gives
along its seam

it can no longer hold
under the weight

i let it

some sorrow does not come
to destroy
it comes to consecrate
fissures inflicted years ago
left half-tended

the body knows
breaking that entombs you
beneath all you shouldered
and the breaking
that splits the rock
opens the vein of gold
no one knew it was holding

sometimes
the only way to keep breathing
is to grant the heart
its long-withheld petition
to break

wholly

allow the patient parts
beneath the fracture
to be let up
for air