Wrist Deep

Figuring

Tireless driver,
driving the world like a hoop
with your long regular stick,
you meander the cosmos skipping stones
on the shores of existence.
Black water spreads like echoes
bouncing in a vacuum where there is no sound.
Sleepy, six-headed earth bender,
I’m a little embarrassed to admit
I’ve been eavesdropping on you all these years,
watching patterns in your movement
(you have become so predictably unpredictable).
Lazy thief,
you’ve left fingerprints everywhere
and I have been rousing the red iron dust
of your sneezes to see them.
Metronome father, dulcimer mother; you
are a thousand spoked wagon wheel giver
with no hub and no circumference.
In the delta at the meeting place
of circumstance and consequence
I found you
huddled like a toad.
You were crying like a quiet cooling coal
whispering your convoluted mantras
which I cataloged one by one in the river muck
until you slid your slick time-machine hands
over the words, made smooth the mud
and produced from it trilobites
that we halved and ate like peaches,
the egg-white colored guts stuck to our chins.
Ancient wind-talker, strange
that you ate so much like a child then.
I told you so and you thanked me.
But your needle tongue pierced my earlobe.
From then on I was marked by you
and so picked up my stick and walked with you.
I remember so little of then but what I do
I remember so well; how navigable
the woods were under the lamplight of your voice,
the electricity of your stride; your spiral
galaxy spine; your lightning touch;
your constant autumnal breath, your scent
potent as smoldering foliage.
Smoke magi;
the hollows of your footprints sprout
loose-leaf tobacco and sweet white corn.
When you ascended to the canopy to turn
all the sparrow’s breasts to rubies and
all their nests to amber and tiger’s eye
I shrunk to the size of a tick
and grew to the magnitude of joy.
You could not have held me then
because you had made me too fragile to touch
and so did not return to me—
a troubadour firefly stinging light ceaselessly
with the impossible beat of your impossible heart.