Simultaneously

Kimberly Grey

I am and you are, as larks going, at the same time, away and up, unthought of separately, a blurred black-thing against blue, though we are different, and two. And soon we’ll be lost to a chasm. While moving is an immense gesture, it almost means we can, as astonishingly as things change, be the same. You will understand,

As your plane lands here, didn’t the lady once say in the event of aloneness please hold on? Why have you gone? Here is a question I’ve tried: why at the same time as speaking are we moving away? Though the theory of action explains it well, the function of experience must be experimental. And, too, I knew assuredly that

Once, while slow and desperate, we behaved almost as a low wind, no shame or control. We were as simple as photographs, rendered images, at the same time as living with our figures and it figures you so besieged me that I decided to live, while also sad, in your sadness. Yes, I’ll wear that black dress

When I meet you at the gate, you’ll be walking and I’ll be walking and we’ll both know things cut across time, and how lucky that no time is lost, those small repeated reliefs. Time deserves to be studied, as I study you and me and how we are linked. See we’ve become almost like holy things, while the reverse is also true and every time I see you, while I’m looking,

I’m thinking of a long river, something with no end, as a real river somewhere does, at the same time, into a true-blue sky. It is the same way I imagine us ending, like two parts of the same broken line, who go down trying, as the planes are flying, as the dying are dying, as the not dying are dying, as lovers and lover, I‘ve figured it out: you are only mine when you are moved, at the same time, the same way, I’m moved.

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May 21, 2021

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“Simultaneously” from SYSTEMS FOR THE FUTURE OF FEELING: by Kimberly Grey.
Published by Persea Books December 8th 2020.
Copyright © 2020 by Kimberly Grey.
All rights reserved.
Reproduced by Poetry Daily with permission.

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Kimberly Grey is the author of three books: A Mother Is an Intellectual Thing: Hybrid Essays, forthcoming from Persea Books in 2023, Systems for the Future of Feeling (2020), and The Opposite of Light (2016), winner of the Lexi Rudnitsky First Book Prize. Her work has appeared widely in journals such as New England Review, Kenyon Review, Tin House, A Public Space, and elsewhere. She is the recipient of a Wallace Stegner Fellowship and teaching lectureship from Stanford University, a Civitella Ranieri Fellowship, and Taft and Dissertation Fellowships from the University of Cincinnati, where she earned a PhD in Comparative Literature and Creative Writing. She currently teaches at Webster University and lives in Saint Louis.