I wish for so much, and forget what I wish for
and invent new wants, ladders or pits to fall in
on a snowy day
or a crystal of first frost
on a crinkled brown leaf spreading
a pattern spiraled and perfectly put together
like the little brick house with the flower garden in the front yard and the two people who lived there, spouses
friends
to the eyes of a child they were two halves of one person,
even their names were similar, and their faces had grown alike through the decades, like vines on the same wall, or flowers in the same garden-
I didn't want it then, the tangling of my soul with another glimmering being — I don't know why, but I think I want it
now
because every place I go, I want
to remember it with someone else —
I slept forever
but it was not the blur of sound & fuming color that woke me, it was the faint kindess that fluttered my eyes open,
reminding me,
even in the quiet looming canyon of my formlessness
forging & fighting for permanence,
in a hastening storm that erases all things,
or most of them,
or the ones that must go, like the trash under the sink,
the crowding sounds that must give way to silence —
oh love
it was love that rescusitated and remade me
sustained the goodness
it unearthed and unmade the rest
and spirit, endless and recirculating with the drifting wind
down every street in the hometown
calms and redirects me to the steel frame bench
where I say
this prayer