from Mark Doty - my new hero of language

"And I feel everything shift. My face contorts, involuntarily. Without any warning, with knowing first what I feel, I burst into tears. The grief, the knowledge of grief, isn't in my head; the knowing is locked up in my thighs. What my body knows comes welling up, shaking me, deep quaking indrawn breaths and sobs. He keeps touching me, easily; he covers my face with a cloth so that  I will not be ashamed. He enjoins me to let it out but I don't need any more coaching. I couldn't stop if I tried; a deep well of the darkest and most brackish water of myself has been tapped, an arterial spring held under tremendous pressure. Except that we think of springs as clear, pure water, and this is the fountain of sheer darkness, interior geyser of bitterness held at such depths it pours forth laying waste, burning everything in its path. How did I ever contain it?These great breathless heaving sobs are mine. I let them rumble and tear loose, rising up out of me into the air. I am literally and metaphorically naked, helpless, entirely vulnerable, and for some reason I feel completely safe, able to give myself over to this pouring out of myself. When we talk about being self-conscious, we're really talking about being aware of others; to be self-conscious is to be afraid of being judged. What I felt was self-possessed, in the old sense of possession; fully entered and inhabited by myself, purely immersed in this body's grief.

And not just the sorrow of grief. But the rage of it , too, the salty choking bitterness, the self-pity and incoherence and ferocious negation of it.

The freeing, fierce negation.

"I wish I could find words like that. The incredible descriptive pain and feeling of a moment, a space in time. The pain and rage. I need to write more and internalize less. I have felt that way. I have never found words for it. Not until now.

from 'Heaven's Coast' by Mark Doty, 1996