duhpursuit

We are children; we wade in
waist deep until there is nothing left to hold.
Everything we touch in this moment is golden–
the gilded morning, autumn, whistling softly
while we work on hope, your body and my body
rippling the surface of another, moving
in all directions, but one.

Nothing is more precious, more tenuous, more feeble,
than the delicate flesh of the heart, pulsing a million times
before we can take our first steps, before the earthworm,
moving blindly in his earthen cathedral, takes one
and leaves the other four to break.

If we could move through the world like this,
blind and solitary, emerging only when the obvious signs
of rain have made their way down to us,
bursting skyward without the slightest thought of birds–

But for now we are still
navigating the tepid undulations in our sleep,
another dream just hours from now, waiting to rise
and fall, two dreamers astonished by the crest
of another successful exhalation.

I tried looking for unexpected gifts today. There were some, but the things I’ve lost kept coming back to me. The blood I lost when I stubbed my toe trying to water the plants. The sanity the mourning dove lost when the hose rained down on the hanging basket where it has made its nest. The boy named Micheal who I loved in daycare who had lost a leg, and the memory of how his blue eyes looked into me and smiled, fierce and direct like late afternoon sunlight. He was my dance partner. Heel, toe, heel in step together, our doughy bodies wrapped in fluorescent spandex and sequins as we smiled from the thickly curtained stage, the red fabric wrapping us together as we ran into the wings. The silver ring that looped my thumb all those years and was lost somewhere in the desert. The fear I felt that first day of school when they looked back at me and I wondered if I would be able to do this, let them in, let them go. All these near endings. Memory splintered and deep working its way to the surface.