Starting Over #3

Starting Over
(take one)

I want to learn to forgive(under her breath, myself).
-cut-

Starting Over
(take two)

The way geese keep flying long after the loss
of one of their own, long after the bullet slips
through the heart and forces a swell of feathers
to parade along the clouds like a ghost,

how the gap fills long before the feathers
ever find the earth.
-cut-

Starting Over
(take three)

I want to learn.
-cut-

Starting Over
(take four)

The earth let me love her first, let me wallow in her dirt
as a child and place her rugged grace in my mouth,
and then she started to hold me
with wind, with water,
she let the folds of my palm be her settling ground,
the dept of my hair, her solitude.

When I beg her to forgive the things I have done, she
-cut-

Starting Over
(take five)

I want.
-cut-

Starting Over
(take six)

tells me the secrets I needed to know when I was young,
when I still believed in magic, when my own flight
from the top bunk, my one true wish guiding my invisible wings,
would have saved my footsteps from trampling her flowers,
she tells me
-cut-

Starting Over
(take seven)

I.
-cut-

Starting Over
(take eight)

I trace my fingers along the borders of the map,
place the names along the back of my crooked teeth like
piles of dirt or limbs to burn,
where they pile up and gargle my speech, my breath:
Belarus, Estonia, Ukraine, Azerbaijan, Kazakhstan,
I never learned enough the way the earth already knows.
-cut-

Starting Over
(take nine)


-cut-

Starting Over
(take ten)

forgive yourself, the rest will follow.
-cut, that’s a wrap-