I want to tell you that I  felt more than alive; I felt pulse; I felt acutely in tune and gorging. I felt more than the familiar, the self.

____

     from the beginning

                                 a wrestle with                 my self


                                                    a  labor


                                                                            of  work

                                 and  breath.


     a canvas of   body      and  beauty


                                 of   breath.


                                                                            like a new day


     a new inside     coming


                                                       out


                                                                             out


                                                                                               out



       like a sun

                                                     enflamed

                                                                        engaged


     enrapt
                                  in light

____

I didn’t say saturated, though yes in image, in text, in breath, and beauty and breath and beauty, and oh the beauty.

It was the first time and yet, better than the first time. A replacing of the actual  first time; this new turn; this new length; the reach of  it.
 
A mirroring of   body and beauty and body and beauty; a satisfaction, a testament; an order of allowance and gift and a decree of density; a plunge. There was a delay satisfying, a flash of  body of  beauty of  breath and beauty and breath and body and breath and breath and breath and then then then—the sense of my blooming before my self before my former self before the new self  stuttering before me

                                                      for-me

                                                                          for-me

                                                                                             and

                                                                                                           for-me

____

What I said was I felt  engorged.  I said I felt  engorged  and I did. I felt enlarged with breath and body with blood and breath and body and beauty in the flash of body and word and beauty, and the body was my own and my own only body and the medium, the channel was forged in breath and image and in beauty and breath and the way I showed myself to myself.

____

Did you know there is something called a “spark bird”? It’s the first bird you see with your eye; it is the first bird that changes you, changes your life, and inspires you to love birds. I’m not sure what mine was exactly but it could be the first time I saw a hummingbird in Santa Fe in 2016. I couldn’t believe I saw it with my own eyes: all that color in its beak; its wings; its forehead. I marveled at its ferocity; its splendor; its small breath. I saw another one in Utah this summer, which is probably ordinary, but I found it extraordinary.

It makes me think of what Ocean Vuong says in his novel: “It was beauty, 
I learned, that we risked ourselves for.”

It is always the beautiful we are after, or at least that I am after; the beauty in love, in dream, in hope,

                                             in the body

                                                                   and the body

                                                                                             of  the body

                                                                                                                   of  the body

____

A friend offers the word unleashed, and yes I was unhanded and ponied away (a bitch, a slut, a woman—call it what you will); I was the wild and the hunger; and the circling in the darkness was a rhythm of my own—the guide of my own destination—but who held the bridle? (It doesn’t matter.) Still, the rival of the struggle; I rivaled and rebelled in the light and dark of the flush and the curved; the dips and stirs and in my sigh, in my clank, an imagined grip or pull. See it—there I am—clacking my feet to the breath; the clop of my hand, of  the way that spark sat above me, like a chant; a breath, slick and slender and slendering-still         sliding.

____

I want to go back to the spark bird. Maybe I am my own spark bird. I have changed my own seeing with the seeing of myself.

____

Mapplethorpe said, “If I had been born one hundred or two hundred years ago, I might have been a sculptor.” If it were me, I would have still been at this struggle—this work of being a poet in this life. I would still be finding other ways to show myself to myself; to unravel the beauty of  the word.

Here’s the truth: we are always arriving at ourselves. I gave myself  to myself and the giving was revelation was destination was body and body was brush and brush and brushfire was unburied and unbound—

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