Labyrinth

my favorite piece I've written

i.

I am a circle

A serpent turned onto itself

Consuming the broken and bloodied parts of me

So that I might be reborn

On and on again

We are back at the beginning

I am my own undoing

You are an open hand

Bearing weeds and seeds and salts

and the songs that sit

Tenderly on my tongue

You are the flush of my cheek

Crushed cherries, cinnamon bark, wild oats bursting from the bed we make in each other’s bodies

Every enter and rebound a million flowers blooming

you anchor into me and I dissolve

I am but a grain of sand rolling carelessly in your palm

I am a broken clock

A broken woman

A boat with no anchor

I am endless and empty and wading into the shallow waters of this harbor

The light from your window, the flicker of some ancient fire

You are an open hanging door, cracked and the color of morning

You look at me like a question mark

I curl around your doubts like a cat in your lap

Gently begging your remembering

Remembering all the different lives I awaited your return

ii.

You are a woven basket

In the hands of great great-grandmother

Carrying her children and their children

Carrying me

They named me so that I might find you here

Bitter sweetly singing

“At Last”

Off key

But in tune

Apple cheeked and chewing on rosemary

You are a promise I whispered to the dream of my daughter before she left my womb

You are a secret I held in my heart in the quiet of her unfurling

iii.

There is a home somewhere

At the end of a dirt road with a familiar name

There is a home

On a patch of dirt under a broken sky

Where the land feeds and takes and feeds again

And under a tree you are sitting

Like you were there all along

So quietly I almost missed you

The shadow of our lying bodies a fossil in the earth

So moss laden and wild

I almost forgot

You are the beginning and the end and all things return to this very spot

I am a circle

You are my infinity

I almost forgot