Hooray for Earth
Before we had to scoop the wind from our shoes, I found a new way to be lost. You placed your soft palms around my face and prepared for my departure, with your voice taut and thin like a stretched net against my ear, you said hooray for Earth.
Yes, I thought. Hooray, for our secret swampland with its deep, murky green bruises, for topsy-turvy trees we climbed in the thick, swarming heat just to attend a foreign sunset. Hooray for the six, seven blackbirds who watched us climb down, silently, their legs drawn up in sacred geometry.
Hooray for our very first place on Earth, the sad patch of boulevard we met on. Behind the most common kind of dune, sandy and drab, you traced exciting, indefinable Gaelic words onto the tops of my feet slowly, over and over in light little hills. Before anyone could know, we were two tendrils of smoke, curling around one another in buses and trains, billowing out of the towns we thought we could not survive. Hooray for the ones that healed us, corner to corner, bone by bone. Hooray for our bodies, how they combed through the high, waxy grass of devotion, the one stretch of terrain we left impossible to navigate.
Hooray, most of all, for the final flickering of our wings just before we found a place to rest, always, the miles tucking us in. I used to believe only you could find the way home. You warned me not to look for it, like a spider you said, carry it with me. But I worried about my own dark forest, how I must escape it, weave out my inner orb; the heart is an old world spool. Hooray. Finally, you were standing still. So, I left you to root. I left you, while your eyes flooded with sunlight, fixed in a direction I forgot how to point in.