Little Soul Contemplates Skin as the Largest Organ of the Body
Smooth wing singing on air —
in bed at night I would start
the story, Once there was a little girl …
but couldn’t think what came next.
I wanted to be heard by
everyone in my life exactly as I
sounded to myself, wing, singing, but the words
kept imploding like the fragile
soap bubbles I tried to blow gently
to the top of our elm — so I’d pretend
I was Davy Crockett, wounded
in the shoulder, finally resting, certain
the Alamo would hold, and my faithful
horse would soon carry me home.
I must have wanted to wrap myself
in something that would bend
but not break as I moved through
the day’s white water — the reprimands
and questions, large people coming
in and out of any room to bump
against my thoughts — the way I imagined
a cloud would hold, if I landed from a great
height — a little giving ground, a little
firm sky. I must have been seen as a sulky kid,
a walking scab, and wanted just to get by.
From the valley that cradles me now
I straighten up and peer over the rim
like the sun. I touch my shoulder. It’s
nearly healed. And the heart? A sapling.
A flowering. An old tree full of nests …
For the child who couldn’t find
an ending but learned to build poems
out of twigs, I breathe a thanks
long in coming — and for the mountain
that keeps its shape beneath swaths
of fog — and for the friends
who have breathed their stories
over mine, flowing in and out
of homes I have lived in,
the walls inhaling and exhaling
to hold us — and for the tall horse
that has carried me along dunes
and ditch banks, giving me something
like wings, though he is sometimes
afraid of shapes in the wind.