Along the lake and down the hill,
the road dead ended into a meadow
with a wooden fence a girl could slip through,
and slip through she did,
that five-year-old version of me,
slipped through the gaps into the tall green grass
and then wandered to the lake
where the weeping willow hung over the shoreline
and she could sit beneath its shade and disappear—
or perhaps more rightly, she could show up.
As herself. Show up not as a girl who lived up the road
but as shade, as shore, as tree,
as field, as green beyond the fence.
Perhaps it only happened once or twice,
that journey past the dead end,
but forty-seven years later, I remember
the dissolution, how beneath that tree
I was no longer who I was, only more so.
How I knew myself as integral to the miracle.
There were whole decades I forgot her,
that infinite version of me.
Tonight I can tell she never left.
How did she ever fit in my limited sense of self?
What does she have to teach me now
of fences, of shadows,
of sitting quietly,
of the art of slipping through?