Cataract

I plunge cold thunder
fighting blind,
for air,
for footing,
fighting all in,
every muscle,
every cell
into the cataract of grief,
sanity a glancing, bruising touch.

Lying now broken on the rocks,
past knowledge of life and death,
I am collapsed into a point of
no past, no future,
surrounded still by the roar
of the water.

Patricia Merrifield