Across an Open Field

Migratory birds make their shapes—

I hold my thoughts as separate from me

so that I can see them.

That the darkness I feel

is not mine, does not belong innately to me. . .

That many people have chorded their sadness

around me. . .

Whatever that winter was,

I have made it through.

Now I stand in diminished light, walking the lake’s darker edge.

Each time we return to a memory, we change it.

So, when I tell you about those nights in the jungle, sleeping

in hammocks, the sky, for once

not dulled by human light

and how the boy, next to me, kept telling me I was beautiful,

reaching through the hammocks to touch my skin, and how

I could not stand it

Does language move me closer, or further away?

Back then, I clung to my own ugliness.

If I was ugly, then I could not be loved.

Each day, river water stripped my skin of dirt. I thought

it was safer to feel my shame

than it was to want.

Maybe like everything, healing has a season, dormant, but rooting.

Like how, today, my heart is full of romantic feeling, I can see

it everywhere: love on the faces of strangers on the train.

Each smiling softly into their phone, or gazing

past the darkness.

For so long, I picked people who could not get along,

Desire was an arrow, but now desire

is the field.

I have three choices: to drift through life

anesthetized, to soften. . .

The lake looks frozen, but it is not.