Milkweed Editions

We’ll say unbelievable things
to each other in the early morning—

She sends me an article from a recent National Geographic that says,

Sharks bite fewer people each year than
New Yorkers do, according to Health Department records.

Then she sends me on my way. Into the City of Sharks

I’ve come from the lacing patterns of leaves,
I do not know where else I belong.

Perhaps we are always hurtling our bodies toward
the thing that will obliterate us, begging for love
from the speeding passage of time

What if, instead of carrying
a child, I am supposed to carry grief?

What if I want to go devil instead? Bow
down to the madness that makes me.

What
would happen if we decided to survive more? To love harder?
What if we stood up with our synapses and flesh and said, No.
No, to the rising tides.

I am a hearth of spiders these days: a nest of trying.

Time, as we know it, is the original shape-shifter. Now the line of it runs straight as an old railway track; now it is a circle – many circles, in fact. Now it dances without moving – to and fro across millennia – around the whole turning world, filling the night sky with bounding green lights. Past, future, present: the unbidden, ineffable gift of it all. Memory is like a white moth in flight. Sometimes she comes so close that we can see the light falling into the hidden parts of ancient markings. On other days we cannot see her but we feel the delicate wing-beat down deep, in beside our bones.