Where did you come from? My likeness turned
handsome. I think you emerged from a dust devil,
dervish I passed on a road in Texas, steering into
a distant shimmer. I knew the heat
beside the roadside daisies, the spike
of pollen I found myself mired in, the sting
of nectar. You were born after a stranger laid
her hands on my belly and pronounced you
ready, told me my plans were a fabrication
like time or weather reports. You move through days
like an object on sonar, morphing as you travel.
Once you were a whale, smooth and mysterious,
and then a ship with an unseen captain. I worry
at your every sigh, try to move the wheel
where it doesn’t intend to go. I didn’t dream you
correctly, but here you are, a cyclone
that swirls around me, a column of particles
kinetic and clumsy, vibrating with such intensity
everything nearby must fall away.
You drove on your first try into a shrub
of rosemary. And this is how it is: I’m holding
very still in the passenger seat, trying to will the road
to conform to wherever you are headed.

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