No one showed me how to write poetry.
I discovered it on my own.
Like life, no one showed me how to live,
it came through windows,
through the lattice of a crib,
in darkness when no one came.
It came when I saw a bird
moving on the wall, a shadow.
And life was a tree without flame,
a dance without music,
a hand disembodied from itself.
So I grew into life,
as if it were waiting,
holding a door,
letting light stream through some blind,
a curtain.
And like poetry it was full of faces
and color,
and showed me a place to be still,
to walk.
To count sunrises and night-falls,
stretch time into a memory
of flags and roads.
It was the smell of the world,
the touch of a feather,
the imaginal visions of clouds and water,
and I invented nothing.
I needed only to listen and hear,
see and feel,
and the world invited me to be
everything it was.
It gave no reason, no explanation,
no truth.
It gave me, simply,
the gift of becoming anything I wanted,
a sea and I became an ocean,
a river, and my blood flowed serpentine.
Under a sky of infinite extension
without effort or prayer.
That is the story of my becoming,
to inherit a universe.
If I die,
it can be no more.
There is nothing in heaven to contain it.
It is free as I am free,
yours, mine, and no one’s.