From my gilded terrace,
I shoo away
shirtless children
who pluck coins
from the fountain.
"They are wishes!"  I yell.
"They are fish!"  They yell back.

I don't recall the first time
I did anything;
I didn't, one day,
pick up a pencil
and start drawing the sky.

I have always been
an expanding universe
of stars and galaxies
and dark spaces
revealing itself

When I was a child,
they buried chicken bones
in the backyard,
and when I dug them up,
they told me I had
discovered dinosaurs.

The spider web cracked mirror in my room
will never regain its clean, sheer surface,
but if I look from the proper angle,
or tilt my head to the side a tad bit,
I will see a face that once reflected
the promising light in my mother’s eye.

split me open
and you will see
a tiny seed
that once might have
sprouted and clung
to a trellis
bearing lush fruit
and casting shade
but now is just
a pitless stone
that has never
seen the garden

Splayed on the grass, under the listing birch,
I bemoan to a thousand unmoored moons
floating between a million bare branches
undulating like waves in the still night,
gurgling ungracious words about climbing
when I could barely grasp the bottom branch,
hoping, one day, to climb so high I might
caress the anchored stars with humble hands.

I step aside
to let you by
but then you say
I’d rather stay