Self-Portrait as Tuning Fork

by Rosemerry Wahtola Trommer

          I am what continues.
                          —Joi Sharp

There is, perhaps you’ve felt it,
a moment when the day falls away
and your name falls away and

everything you thought you knew
falls away and for a moment
you know yourself only

as whatever it is
that continues—
your whole body abuzz

with the eternity of it—
and you quiver
as if struck by the great hand

of what is true,
becoming pure tone,
a vibration, a wave,

a human-shaped resonator
tuned to the frequency
of life itself,

and though later you might try
to dissect what happened,
in that moment you’re too abloom

to wonder how or why,
you simply are
this ecstatic unfolding

knowing the self as I am,
so alive and so infinite
you tremble like a song.

~ Rosemerry Wahtola Trommer
from her lovey book of poems The Unfolding