It Still Has That 'New Poem' Smell

I have been waxing poetic this week, and ignoring my leg stubble. This week's offering is fresh. So fresh it may not even be finished. It's like poetry sushi, or tableside guacamole. I hope you enjoy the poem, but the fact that you now have visions of leg stubble and guacamole prancing through your head is your problem.

Fake kisses,


Cindy


Three Seasons

Anguish, it is borne in the leaving.
And joy, is in our coming home.

I miss those three seasons—
that age of forming,
those days of slow growing
and gentle becoming—
blind and safe in the miracle
of salted darkness.

My easy days of knitting bone,
of weaving skin—that
quiet unfurling—
the dance toward awakening,
of toes-unwebbing in careful steps
to the swish and thump
of a beating heart.

I would, if I could, go back
to that place where sleeping
was the same as floating,
was the same as flying.

In my smallness and roundness
I embodied every promise
and every possibility.
But I couldn’t have imagined
any of this—a world
so dry, so bright and thin.

Who could live in such a place?
A hard and brittle room that doesn’t
give when I kick against it—
a convex curling away—this is no womb.
It will never feel like home.

Beginnings must push
away from themselves
killing the line
to close the circle.

Over arc and into horizon,
our distal origins echo
in the bloodsongs
of nostalgic longing.

How I miss those
dream days of swimming
in my red-black lake, pooled
in the velvet grotto
of my mother.