56 negative space

I have imagined waking up one morning
and meeting you for the first time
and I would dream that no old self would show its face
or bleed in through my own, that the lines drawn on me would be
wholly different from present patterns.
And frequently I tell you I’ve changed
and that I am changing again
like a river that was stopped up and is now flowing again—
it isn’t a return to form but it’s a motion that is continuing:
The water is moving from one place to another.
I dreamed of a woman who could lose something now
and find it in the past, and so things would change,
and I wanted to believe that the pieces of myself I’d lost
are being found by another self.
That the pieces of myself I am finding were lost by someone else,
an exchange in dance.
So one day I will lose myself
walking through the village
and there I will find myself in a place face to face with my own self
and not recognize who it is. I won’t wait to realize what it is I’ve found—
how special it is, how sacred to find something thought lost.

So I imagined the tips of the trees drawing a lightning bolt on the sky
in the places they don’t meet. The spaces that can’t touch
build another space—cities that sit between cities,
the spaces in between you and me. And I filled in the notes between what you wouldn’t say
with my own words. I told you I thought I needed to be there for things to be beautiful,
that the world would be empty without a witness, that a conversation with one end
is no words at all.

I have changed.
I saw the green light glow like sunwater through a cherry tree’s leaves, today,
and I have grown a faith in my center, without even knowing, like a moss, a parasite, a child,
that beauty is beautiful, even when I can’t see it.