Inexplicable light, uncontainable joy,
The abeyance of understanding
That led me to leap
Into another life
From one now unrecognizable.
There was no journey mapped,
No person seen,
No future imagined,
But now the first tears fall through
The impenetrable membrane
Of past and future.
It was a school, a hard and
Beautiful school, with each new level
Magical and unpredictable and cruel.
How could I know that it, too,
Had a course away from itself
And back to forks I'd lingered over,
Chasms in the fabric
Where what I needed
Seemed on some other side
Than where it was, with me,
Always inside? It was somewhere
In the imperturbable future
Where arrival is disguised
As something old and unresolved
But almost conceivable,
Until the new world grows around you
So familiar
You forgot where you even were,
A beginning and end don't matter.
The flame of the change
Was made slow, manageable,
Though it's recalled
As a bolt of light
Smiling on the choice I made
For nothing more specific than love --
The details I had asked for
Not even clear on the far reach --
Never to know the path I chose,
Only the way
It made me feel.
