All I want is to be a woman

All I want
Is to be a woman.
All I need
Is to dance over a wood floor
witnessed by a few who love me,
to tell them who I am.
All my life is a page torn from this book,
Torn out in supposition of completeness or rage.
There is no perfect moment,
Only specificity.
The way I design things
Falls apart when I light the candles
and start to play.
The insides rewrite themselves into a future finale
And I forget why I came here.

I notice I am on stage again.
I have tears in my eyes
You look through me,
Not into me.
You see something of yourself in my face
I don't know who you are.
This tenderness of mine
I keep shut,
closed out of reach.
But on stage it is safe to show:
I give you unnamed souls,
Death crying,
A baby being born in light.

I give you everything I have forgotten to remember about myself.
I give you the way my belly flowers when I open to emotions purging in the night.
I give you a balloon, filled up with innocence and tied with a ribbon.
I give you my ambition. I don't want it anymore. You can build your skyscrapers with it
while I collect tadpoles and swim with the fish in my pond.
I will give you the maple tree I sat in as a child, climbed up and read stories all afternoon in the light.

Because all I want
Is to be a woman.
To relinquish this claim I have
On anything other than clay.
All I want is to dig my hands into earth
and live there like a tree for decades to come.
All I want is to remember what it feels like
to be a song on the wind,
An osprey taking flight
over a sun-baked river gorge.
All I want is to be the main character in my own movie,
Cello music playing in the background,
While I drive home in a dusty old pickup.

What if?

I once asked myself,
In a moment of pure and untamed hatred,
What would be left if everything in my life
Crumbled.
What would happen
If there was no outside or in
No looking back
No striving forward.
What if the whole world collapsed in on me
And all that was left
Was my own breathing and heartbeat
Inside a tiny white room?
"Even then," God said,
"I would still be here."

People become trees and stones

There are moments in time
When people stop being people
And instead become trees or stones.
A man fishing across the lake
stirs the water with one thin stroke.
A mountain's clarity sings like a bell
when on one else is listening.
The boulders at the edge of my canoe
Are hungry for a story,
one that is true this time.
This story--my story--
does not have a name, but a shape.
It has a body and breath
moving closer and farther at the same time.
There is no cavity in my body
that does not want to be filled with landscape, water, air, earth.
Elemental fantasies cling to my toes.
I remember being swathed in wilderness
Below stars
Above sky reflected in water.
I remember how I am here.
I remember the visceral touch,
The bone-edging memory
instilled in me through flesh.
O heartbeating drum,
Innocent one,
Little bird birthed from stone,
It is hardly a new beginning
without some taste of emptiness.
I forgot how to cry,
I stood shunned by nothing
escaping judgement
to lie under the sand with stem and leaf protruding.
Supposedly I know something,
A thousand untamed galaxies in my eyes.
Away from here into tomorrow,
Into yesterday,
Remembering a dream not long forgotten.
Standing on a float suspended over sea and air
Growing roots to a floor I remember
from long ago in a lullaby.
A morning song invited in
Opening up to twilight
Or dawn.