If you said today
Run away
I’d reply
I’m too old of heart for taking chances
And yet
If I could leave behind
These footprints of hell
I’d turn my bag inside out
Leave the clothes that made me and now don’t fit
They can hang on tree limbs for another girl
Who hankers after fushia and magnolia
If you can live without
A stomach
I’d set mine free
And empty as a cloud, run
In your direction toward the sea
Where salt spray would take the last
Residue of this awful time, turning back horror
Remind me of joy I once took as permanent
Clamboring through live oak, like fairy folk,
Rays of light like stars shine down from sky
Happy dogs, wet with run, tongues lolling, espie March rabbit
The thin stream between content and crestfallen
Just one turn of fate and all you cherished is gone
Reclaiming yourself somehow, among the fallen
How can you expect to thrive when pain halts every nuance?
A burden you do not know how to lift, for it
Wakes you every dawn with insisted sickening
And if you could, you’d disguard the parts that betray you
Run into the heartlands with nothing more than release
And the long legged stride of a creature unwilling
To be shared
For you are a child of this world and no harm is meant
To slow your step, as you cleave toward pilgrimage
One flat foot in front of the other
Setting prints in ochre mud for generations
Where they will ask, how did she keep trying?
Despite the steapness of the trail
And the lapse into despair, how did she
Keep her compass set?
If you said today
Run away
I’d reply
I’m too old of heart for taking chances
And yet …
One foot follows freedom even as the other
Chaffs against chain
It is in my nature, to seek the wild
Among nature, reclaim, loss of liberty
Trying to pin me to insect board
Dry up my dreams, pack away the urge
You haven’t claimed all of me
As long as a part stays
Fixed on open door
I will in time defeat this shackle
Turning into a bird
Threading my flight far
From your waning power.
If you said today
Run away
I’d reply
I’m too old of heart for taking chances
And yet
I want the girl who was just there a moment ago
Who stood on tip-toes and wore clothes twenty years too young
Who didn’t brush the back of her hair and ate with her mouth lolling
If it were a matter of wishing myself better, I’d sell it all and start over empty handed
Reclaim the lost self, in the strange soup of sickness that makes enemies of us
I want to wake up and be, a girl of air and sea and breath
I want to feel whole and no longer racked by hurt
Go forward in time and reclaim what is lost
make me well again, said the child, in the girl, in the woman.