July 18, 2017

you're not crazy

For the tattoo you're plotting on your vertebrae, or the paragliding flight off the cliffs
at Fort Funston, or the two thousand miles of a bike path along the Mississippi
that you conjure from your window seat at 30,000 feet and say, "Why not?" as your neighbor
polishes off the last pages of a romance novel. Surely, someone deemed improbable
the dream that led two people to meet each other in that big house in suburban New Jersey,
on a holiday weekend no less. But the math, eventually, pierced through all that
unlikelihood, just as every ambition gripping you with its wild, tentacled longing
cuts through the thickest glass, even as the signs warn otherwise. Your language
has its own cadence. You lean on certain words, luxuriate over particular consonants.
So, too, does desire. Mapless to everyone but the girl with her heart on the trail.