what they don't tell you about love

the way you'll shuffle forward, stumbling on the uphills,
taking small, incremental steps to avoid catastrophe.
and that you will reach a delicate precipice regardless,
and the drop will seem doomed and dismal
and your heart will want to flee
and you will remember how
your heart did flee once, twice,
numbers of times,
you will count them on the fingertips of your left hand
you will churn memories forward
tell misbegotten tales of
wrong turns and broken hearts
and not-so-narrow escapes.

you will arrive at the clearing with these stories
calendars full of your own, unwitting demise,
the shit you've done you thought, on the one hand,
could make a good anecdote, and then, now, in the telling,
does not at all,
your pockets will be stuffed
with muddy handfuls of stories
vicious reminders of your own unintended failures
the limits your young, unschooled heart kept to
to survive each earthquake.

and still, there will be this small miracle.
the treeline bare, visible again.
the trail ending at last.
your body, loosed from its own precise choreography.

and your cells will make the decision
for once.

you will grab at your history
in hungry fistfuls.
you will fling the pockets outward
emptying yourself of what is now nothing more
than debris.

peering at the edge of precipice
you will, despite everything,
see what is waiting for you.

and thus empty,
you will leap.