ON YOUR OWN

I am following you at a distance through the fields, I am giving you a distance, my gift to you, as you traverse and I find time to fill. Time is the largest thing that looms between, but you nod as I twirl the grass and let it fall back into the dirt, you say you’d never swim here, it’s just a big frog pond, and I tell you about swimming this afternoon where the muck swallowed my knees, and one funny guy said he felt a skull with his foot, and so we all tried to skim the surface and evade the silt.

You are much more reasonable with distance than I predicted, you are none of my suspicions. You are your mother’s jeep, you are half empty iced tea bottles bobbing along in the back seat, those bottles could be linked by a cord and hung like lights, we could decorate a world in all the debris, look I would say, as if I’d shown you the trick of beauty, the girl-touch of making it all into something lovely, but no I would know, you had all the materials on your own, proud I would feel, though that is a cheap thing too.