25

it's May, held in by moons, held up by flowers. the poem was supposed to already exist. the farm has put fingers in the ground. what works doesn't work now. the stillness is hollow but not so you can get inside it. in the sea of voices you do your counting, they're comfort numbers without significant accumulation. you can do shoulders together with a solid agreement. someone dug up the moss in that one spot but what's behind it still fits.
                          i wonder where our texture went
                                                    while the poem was caught in my throat, while my saying shape pushed its fragments around the misshapen conclusion. i do not desire a map for this. i am doing these weekend studies of being lost in the woods for a few minutes, long enough for me to lean into my new life of becoming the forest. i could take the bit further than this. i could bite the stone i keep in my pocket to remind me i have hands. i could remember my knots, having never forgotten them. the poem hasn't moved yet, so i don't know if it's the kind made of everything i've ever swallowed rising to completion or the kind aiming belly-down, the kind that never becomes poem and just rejoins the poem of my body and its pulp.