GLIMPSING THE AFTER WORLD

Stepping into the shower somewhere
in the middle of my sixty-fourth year,
I feel the after world or what might pass
as an after world washing over my skin
for the first time. It is a glancing moment,
no more than a couple seconds, a shiver,
& then it's gone, leaving me as stunned
as a marketed steer prodded through
the chute & discovering the sledge-
hammer planted squarely in the center
of his forehead just when he reaches
the bottom. Done. No returns.
A midday dream? A passing
shadow? I see (or sense) how, now
after forty-one years together, you & I
have become one, somehow, for a split
instant, a second, not that we think or feel
alike, but that we are, indeed, One,
& I say to myself that if this could be
the after world, this oneness our only true
universe, it might be a happy perfection.
After, I fight to assemble a sentence to
name what I briefly felt, but all you are
able to say is, "I already know what you're
going to say before you say it. Don't, please."


About Terry Savoie:
Terry Savoie has had nearly three hundred poems appear in more than a hundred and fifty literary journals, anthologies and small press publications in the past thirty years.