Thinking back

to the girl I was, there on the wide plains,

ready as always to be older,

hair blowing about my face, following a draw

where the closest thing to forest resides,

a reach of his hand and the surprising words,

“May I kiss you?,”

my sputtering response, feet scuffing the trail,

eyes searching branches above,

and out in the open,

heat lightning flattening the sky,

clouds larger than the world swallowing it operatically,

endless fields of soy and corn green, green and

silently sick with decades of poison, places I avoid,

the tap water tasting of it,

the children and the cancers, their deaths and

their broken parents moving themselves far

and away,

a new life all that can save them,

the foal walking and just born, and

winter’s remaking, everything a crystalline palace,

inches of ice encasing trees and distant sun

shining through.

I wasn’t a girl then.

But from here, thinking back,

I surely was.

Amaranth blush of silver maple,

grape hyacinth, flowering quince and crocus,

yellows, whites, purples, colors rising

from frosted dirt.

Poetry opens upon the skin of the earth.

How stirrings there

happen here,

within bone and blood.

Forgetting not to look, I see

with soft eyes closed,

unwinding spines of sprout, of vine,

twist toward sunlight.

Fully unbound by thought,

none needs instruction or understanding–

each knows its source and pattern,

with the only timing being right timing.