how you began:

you are swallowed back into my womb
as the pain of childbirth is swallowed back
into the innocent anxiety that exists
before experience

you are reduced to a tiny seahorse
but you could be the beginning of any creature:
a bird a fish a salamander

you are a metaphor for your own unconscious evolution

even further back you are one cell
created from the melting together of two gametes
but we as your parents did not invent your existence

you were before this two separate beings

you were the passion of our sex
you were the fine filament that drew us together as strangers
you were there through the history of our lives

waiting

and waiting still are your children
or maybe one child
or maybe none

maybe you will coast through the vastness of the sky on taut wings
maybe you will swim through the endlessness of the ocean
with silvery scales like seashells
maybe you will emerge from a childhood underwater smooth-skinned
to live in the dampness of the earth

i want you to never be many things that i am

but you have been given both choice and fate
whatever you become is what you are
and perfect

tiny bones

curled against me like still in the womb
your small bones fine cap of fuzzy hair
quick unsteady breathing
like tiny animals

like the new creature we brought home from a farmhouse
the owners too cheap to spay their dogs
dad number two says

the surprise at finding it so untamed
yelping all night peeing on floors and furniture
nipping at fingers slobbering on faces and clothes

no control
the helplessness so demanding
but pure
true need

no capacity for selfishness

The Oblivion

The moon was an orange globe
as it sailed its burden of clouds
over the spearhead silhouettes of treetops
as it followed us along
this ribbon of pavement that divides fields
into patchwork
(the road we travel being a thread
in the oblivion of open pastures)

In the warmth of the speeding car
you spoke
and grinned
in your manner of joking
that suggests
there is business beneath the play
and there will be no mercy here
(The idea is love but the meaning is hate)
and as you continued
I smiled to acknowledge the humour
remembering that humour covers our shame
but mocks our dignity

The ancient hands of winter branches
reached open towards the sky
awaiting the answers of Spring
their plea for disclosure
a star
in the oblivion of endless galaxies

Time Travel

As children we wish to mimic time travel
to undo our own passage
across a pathway stepping backwards
heel-over-toe

We expect the wind of our footfalls
to rush back into our bodies like a wave
the surge of our blood reversing
our fingertips light with a buoyant flood

But instead our footprints double over themselves
as if we have trampled this soft earth twice
in the same direction

The impressions of our soles
do not dissolve into the smoothness
of wet clay returning to uniformity

once transformed this energy does not retreat

Instead the earth remembers the suction
of our skin’s slippery touch
its own quick surrender to our weight
giving no allowance for erasure

Like time a distance traveled
is infinite in its existence
indefinite in its beginning