There is a law,
the return of the eternal.
Physicists call it something else.
I prefer to think of it as a ball,
blue, with clouds on it.
Like the one Jackie pushes at me.
A planet lost among the rugs
and walls of a child,
a grandfather.
The ball orbits between us,
and each day a word takes root,
a flower of magic,
a piece of the mind’s thread.
Our lives grow.
I am bewildered and astonished.
Jackie and I are becoming.
Each day a secret of the heart
is exposed.
We live with the ages written in us,
but belong to ourselves.
I show Jackie everything I know.
All the locks and windowpanes,
the slick of oil with its dark rainbows
on the street,
airplanes overhead,
memorialize the leaves,
watch a small oak grow in the hedge.
He keeps track.
He never forgets.
Here and there
the individual people of the garden
are greeted.
We have established rituals.
He looks into boxes of cans
from the trash,
and sees alloys of perfection,
cones and cylinders
and soft metal that crunches and rings.
We are growing together.
My old life expands,
new life begins.
He will become the past and the future,
and the thread is woven on a loom.
Nothing ever is the same
as souls emerge,
angels coming into life
in the sacred returning to forever.