How We Met.

Every body I touched before you was a reference.
A map of some other land,
where my only clues were found in the boundaries.
I spent years traveling to the edges of the map —
each person I came to know was telling me
who you would be, and who you would not be.
They were promises, fed one by one to Chance;
Who sat perched as a hungry new bird
On the branch of the magnolia tree that has been hanging above me
since that Spring when I decided to stop pretending
that I had already found you.
The bird held the promises under her tongue without swallowing
as they squirmed and pulsed and changed;
some dying while they waited for something to happen.
When her tiny beak could no longer hold them all,
you dropped from her urgent mouth
into the puddle I was crouched beside on the night we met:
Tying my boot outside of a corner bar.
It was spring, and the open door allowed the hearty laughs
of the hearty men
on hearty stools
to shake the ground we stood on under the Magnolia tree
Who has dropped fistfuls of her stiff, velvet petals all over everything
every day since then.
Her roots comfort me;
Spreading out beneath our feet as fast as we travel.
A reminder that every day that passes in her shade
No matter what it brings
Is another day that the bottom cannot fall out.
