I Am The Edge

By Hilary Noonan

There’s an edge to everything

Cold edges to the frozen seats of the car in the morning as we rush off to school in the winter

We sit on fingertips and rock back and forth looking for warmth, covering the edges, covering the cold

And cold edges of countertops where strawberries are cut and pancakes are made and homemade pizzas are rolled out and cut into squares, not triangles and crumbs are swept with hands into palms and then into trash cans

Cold edges of the mind like a creaky attic, where the rocking chair tips forward and backward on the edges of its wooden base, eeeeeh oooooh eeeeeh oooooh

Who wants to go up there

Cold edges like the days after someone dies where you walk around seeing everything anew, askew, horrible, how could this world continue but yet it does

Like the edge of a cliff

Standing on the edge of the great Canyonlands, toes dug into the red crumbling clay, scared your young child will run toward it and plummet over the edge, but wanting just a moment to stare at it, into it 

the abyss

Why does the edge appeal so 

Why do I want to crawl toward its depth and down into it and explore its shadows

Do I think I will find the meaning of life down there

In the cracks

In the dark

I put on my black jeans and my black sweater and my heavy, tortoise shell rimmed glasses and I tell the world

I am the edge

Look at these heavy boots, made for stomping

Made for the muck that lives down there where most people are afraid to go

Like Thelma and Louise, hand in hand, flying with smiles into the crevices

Even the small baby, with its miniature fingers curled around adult sized fingers, has the unmistakable edge of having just entered this world

What do they know

What have they seen that they can’t share because they can’t yet speak

Their wisdom is like a tomb, the lost ark, we have maps, we have methods

But we can’t find what’s in their mind

locked away

We can only stare at them, coo

hold them tightly

And wonder

They were just there, where we will always wonder about

And we had been there at one time 

too

On the edge of life

Our only consolation is the darkness

the shadows

the twelve hours of night that pull us into sleep and send us somewhere else

The edge of consciousness 

The edge of life

We close our eyes each night, bidding farewell to the day

We wake each morning, bidding good morning to the dawn

But each sleep is a cliff

The cusp of existence

Who knows what happens in those hours

or why they even happen at all

Each night a tiny death

Each day a tiny life