across a distance of three thousand years someone
is trying to speak to me.
in the desert, we know better than to make a noise, so
I can hear the echoes of something you said
in a year that had not been numbered yet.
a stone dropped into a well does not leave
a circle, unless you can play it backwards in your head,
rewinding it like a tape.
I do not have that skill.
so whatever shape your words were back then,
all I can hear is,
I was here.
now I am not.
you were wrong, of course. you are here with me.
so is your daughter, who I have to imagine
came home with a skirt full of figs,
having forgotten in her excitement to bring the basket.
you taught her to weave when she was only ten years old,
and she picked it up slowly just as you had.
you loved her for that, just one more love in the deep sea
of all the reasons you loved her.
her son wrote clumsy poetry, which you pretended to like.
I love it. I love it for its thick-fingered inability
to express the enormity of the emotions he was feeling.
I, too--packed into my little body are millennia of poems.
poems about still pools,
mouse-haunted caves,
slick red clay,
juniper trees,
red and yellow and white stone.
I hope that time is a rolling wheel,
nothing lost, only patiently arcing away, some day to touch
the ground again.
I hope that three thousand years from now
you will catch the heart
of this poem--not the edges, which have crumbled
away under the weight of time, but the heart,
soft and black, that they once protected.
and oh, my clumsy heart,
that it prays you will hold it close.