Suppose It’s Not Your Road
And the gravel driveway leads your body between parallel lines of crushed rock, and you think the center path is a good way to travel—but it turns out weeds are high, burrs hungry, and your legs become a cross-stitch of scratch marks. Within a year, this place will be clear-cut. Within a year, you will be a name that catches like a fallen seedpod in another woman’s ear at the grocery store—you will be almost familiar, almost planted; your name will end up in a poem and when the poet reads your syllables, the audience will move your body from woods back to main road, back to outdoor concert, back to the last published photo. You will be sunlight, pin-pricked through by shadow. A slide projected and removed—we will remember you as if we are the late-summer grass, the last cradle place.
How About Bears
In our long hibernation, the enforced fallow days, we have watched you grow soft. Watched you through the doorway, read book after book after book. Measured your height on the wall next to the closet, scratched a new mark as you extend toward light and ceiling. We have exchanged notes, our observations, after you finally fall asleep—your brain a complex search engine. We are now and we are then; we are what is to come. In this version of the multiverse, I kiss you goodnight. In this version of the multiverse, I try to explain cosmic dust and the brevity of life. In this multiverse you will return to elementary school for the last time. Yesterday, you did not see the bear high in the tree, did not believe me. Today, you put on your black mask and step into a choir. I step into the river and am weighed down by what is required of us, for you to breathe, for you to be in your body, free in this air.
