The Carrying

I am a hearth of spiders these days: a nest of trying.

What
would happen if we decided to survive more? To love harder?
What if we stood up with our synapses and flesh and said, No.
No, to the rising tides.

What if I want to go devil instead? Bow
down to the madness that makes me.

What if, instead of carrying
a child, I am supposed to carry grief?

Perhaps we are always hurtling our bodies toward
the thing that will obliterate us, begging for love
from the speeding passage of time

I’ve come from the lacing patterns of leaves,
I do not know where else I belong.

There’s a hunger in me,
a need to watch something grow.

You ever think you could cry so hard
that there’d be nothing left in you, like
how the wind shakes a tree in a storm
until every part of it is run through with
wind?

A whole day without speaking,
rain, then sun, then rain again,
a few plants in the ground, newbie
leaves tucked in black soil, and I think
I’m good at this, this being alone
in the world, the watching of things
growing, this older me, the she
in comfortable shoes and no time
for dishes, the she who spent
an hour trying to figure out that the bird
with a three-note descending call
is just a sparrow.

WHAT I DIDN’T KNOW BEFORE
was how horses simply give birth to other
horses. Not a baby by any means, not
a creature of liminal spaces, but already
a four-legged beast hellbent on walking,
scrambling after the mother. A horse gives way
to another horse and then suddenly there are
two horses, just like that. That’s how I loved you.
You, off the long train from Red Bank carrying
a coffee as big as your arm, a bag with two
computers swinging in it unwieldily at your
side. I remember we broke into laughter
when we saw each other. What was between
us wasn’t a fragile thing to be coddled, cooed
over. It came out fully formed, ready to run.