Blackbirdan online journal of literature and the artsSpring 2018  Vol. 17 No. 1
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Poles

I asked the sky for directions.
While things among things connected to things turned
Around my eye, one star out of the myriad gave answer.

I walked away from the glim star again as far as I could.
Was I lost? Maybe. I asked the sky again for directions.
The patterns of things were alien and still turning.
An empty space this time,
Black star of the opposite extreme gave answer.

I walked away from the black star and in sunrise realized
That I was never anywhere other than where I should be,
Though there were those might tell me I did not belong.

That was my moment to realize
I am my own embodied map,
Settled now between the two fixed stars,
The brilliant and the black,
Moving with all the gamut of moving things,
Rooted in no deeper soil than the wind regularly shifts,
Unless rooted so deeply
That my bare feet penetrate soil, bedrock and aquifer,
Descend through moving plates,
Through slow gimbal of lava currents
To an impossible anchor,
The dense liquescence of innermost Earth.

In other words, I am either everywhere or in no particular place.
These are both home.

A fir tree grows from an obeche seed between my feet,
The impossible anchor manifest.
Climbing it slides me down to the antipode;
Leaving it, any next direction, loops me back,
In an ever-honed cone of homing,
To peace, this absence, this empty twin of place.  


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