But it wasn’t until I got up to dance that I entered the music.
Category: forest
mountainside
echoing with tundra swans
a dead deer
A small box of leftover parts
from all the broken things I tried to fix.
In every quest narrative, it’s the very beginning that I like—
before the first adversaries appear, when the path is still a magic carpet and has yet to reveal its serpentine coils.
quartzite
on a warm winter day
the absence of bees
It was only when I switched to unlined paper
that the poems began to come without being called.
Just by living and pushing back against the world
we build our memorials, our rings of stone.
Teeth sprung from their skull prisons
enjoy a second obsolescence as typewriter keys.
On a friend’s kitchen counter,
three potatoes had gone feral, growing ghostly branches out of their eyes. I kept my shirt pulled down so my navel wouldn’t get any ideas.
For a moment I forgot where I was,
the familiar trail colored by my train of thought, which might take me anywhere.
In my dream the creek says:
I am not your pet. I can rise. In one afternoon I can take back everything I’ve laid down for a thousand years.
Someday when the world is entirely covered with roads,
there won’t be any place left to visit—and therefore no reason to ever slow down.
