In blurry confusion voices pierce through, saying
“What do you want?” and “what do you want?”
Blundering, I can’t find my way out of the crossroads quickly enough.
First to know where I am, to know whether I am buying or selling,
threatening or begging. To haul myself off a flashing screen
or a stranger’s dreadlocks as a thousand lines intersect
and cross, stripes on top of stripes as the smells
of sewage and street food intermingle,
and the resulting discordant din.

Then to recognize myself amidst the crowd long enough to ask
what do you want? What do
I want? And when I answer,
do I hear my own voice coming as though from a distant well?
As one note in the hubbub and burble of the human sea?
And do I skim my words like **** from a pond’s surface?

I have not closed my eyes but I have stopped looking through them.
Randomly thawing long enough to realize where I am:
somewhere suffocating, somewhere that closes around the throat
like sea foam: soft, but endless. Scattering
my eyes across all the eyes that bob up and down,
passing and crossing like ships in the dark.
So numb I did not even notice I was drowning.

In the lull, rising to consciousness, breaching the surface
as though for a breath of air. Reconnecting with
and remembering which person I currently am,
and what this person wants: just to be free.
To shake off whatever numbness blended my voice
with the music and chatter and discord of this place
and blurred my face, making me an anonymous limb
attached to a much larger body.
Only now realizing the irony of that condition.

Faintly, faintly, I’m beginning to hear you.
“Teacher” is what I call you, and what you are to me.
“Teach me.” No matter where I may be
my identity will apparently always be
“The Student” and I, like an actor given a role,
play it.

Quietly, a pair of eyes gaze sponge-like
at your catalogue of lessons,
trying to erase the body —
— which is too loud, too needy,
too everything —
and try not to let you be drowned out
by my dreams, my ideas, my expectations.
What are you saying now?

Something about… my own powerlessness?
Not the throngs of swans and the songs of the dawn?
Instead, prolonged wrongs and the dawning sense
that I don’t belong here?

No! No, that can’t be the lesson.
I am too natural, too sky-edged.
I’m too much the daughter of moss,
too akin to the hanging lichen that drapes ghost-like off the trees
and too free, heart up against the sea.
In short, too me.

But this means nothing to you.
I have to go quiet again, stop filling in the blanks
with words and more words. Recalling my role,
I listen for a lesson.

(And this is the first lesson I learn:
“Be Quiet And Listen”)

Fingers laced together, I am a basket.
Take parts to build a heart: you will need
wild things, beautiful things.

Mostly you will need
things that no one asked for,
that no one expected.
Things that have no reason to exist,
but do.

Netted spiderwebs and nettle fistfulls.
Fish scales and cotton cattails.
Dragonflies skimming across the water in the early morning
and fireflies imitating stars in the somber dusk.
The eddies behind rocks that jut brashly from the river
and the ribbons woven wreath-like through wrens’ nests.

Hauled up by handles, dump everything somewhere
you wouldn’t mind living.
Apply heat, settle in somewhere
you wouldn’t mind leaving.
Let sit two to twenty four hours, stirring occasionally.

Listen:
rhythm
one-two
one-two
it lives.

Don’t look at me through eyes
like the fog that clothes the valley
on an early morning in spring
       and say that you are not free.

Willful and wild, you are the wind.
You could spring upwards as though on wings,
singing and dancing,
       entrancingly lively as you slide over the lilac.

Don’t tell me you feel trapped,
that you’ve shorn off your wings
and built a bunker, brick by brick,
       where the wind no longer touches.

“You are free” I tell you.
How can I show you what I know:
that you were meant to fly?
       Carefree and breezily as the clouds in the sky?

But when I say “go! fly away!”
You dejectedly stand,
and when I say “you are free”
       you just don’t understand.

Lying flat in a river bed and covered in sheets of water:
this is where you will live.
Pure, ice-cold springwater flows
around and through, picking clean our bones like a vulture,
taking out the filth that collects like soot in chimneys.

From here only two roads:
To let go or hold on.
The instinct is to deny! hold tight, forever and ever, keep safe,
but you are here to learn the river’s lesson, to follow the flow, to be
carried away and let go.
Die happily, knowing.

Spread like sand
across the hills and gullies
peacefully dispersing
along centuries to form and reform,
learning that there are no endings.
And to know by cycles,
building familiarity, some core knowledge
which undoes the instinct that says “hold on”
and “not yet”
and “fight.”

Instead, become waterlogged.
Give up your boundaries.
This is the only way.

My eyes, python-like, swallow the sky,
greedy for the wrongs in me to go right
at the sight of your gleeful greenery
spilling over creek beds and hills.
The wind, combing out my worries,
blowing away the blockage built
by the fumes and filth collected in city gutters.
I want to be
let wild, made free.
But one wrong turn in your winding maze and I am gone,
a place like this will chew you up and spit you out.
You should leave, something tells me.
No one ever leaves fully intact,
the longer you stay, the more you will fall apart.
“On the contrary” I scoff.
“I am becoming more myself, not less.”
But this is what everyone says
just before they leap in joyful pursuit
to tumble headlong down hidden gullies.
But I am more careful, I assure myself.
I hunt the way crocodiles do,
watching patterns with keen intention,
offering my hands and eyes.
But what should I do if, when the time comes,
You resist?
Disregard me, like an unworthy suitor?
And what if that is what I am?
I see, I take note of
the way the wind blows and the shadows fall,
the way the trees twist clockwise
or counter-clockwise.
The way animals flee when I approach and
the way they keep perfectly still
hoping they are invisible.
And there are times when I see all this, and more.
Like heat distortions above a fire,
something peripheral or liminal,
almost outside the spectrum of what can be perceived
or communicated or defined.
All these trails, the ones seen and unseen
and the ones somewhat seen
lead me to a terrible suspicion:
that the likes of me lacks to tools
to understand the likes of you.
that in harmony with one another
we would both cease to be what we are.
that you will never regard me with love and worse—
you will never regard me at all.
Then I, in frustration, stop going with you.
Start to go against you.
And keep going, finally on my own.
Still myself, but less.