How the World Just Grew Wider

What I didn't know this time yesterday and what I know now, is that I have a Matisse shaped hole in my heart that I have been filling this thirty-four years with scraps of popcorn and ribbon and quotes that I like. But yesterday, I stood and stood in front of this picture and cried, tried to catch my breath, while people came and went, came and went beside me (who can say why one thing digs deep into one person and not another?). And I felt I was dying the way poetry makes me feel I'm dying, the way writing makes me feel I'm dying, the way God right up to my face makes me feel I am dying, reduces me to a moaned prayer of paralysed ecstasy. My skin, my heart, my eyes, my stomach, my bones all liquid, so ready to fall away, fall to the floor and leave standing that spinning centre that only wants to inhale. To exhale some sort of hallelujah.