Found Objects
A poem for those who wonder.
The first time
I met Doubt I learned
he is nothing
like an overstuffed suitcase
too heavy to drag, something
you could abandon
once you were through with it
at the carousel.
Doubt was flyover country,
land you never cared to look
that closely at until you’d stumbled,
alone and mapless, off the tarmac into
its wilds.
No cartographer
could map its hills or trace the yearning
oxbows of its rivers, count
the bones in its mountains’
spine. I couldn't weigh the dust
in its rain-shadowed deserts.
The rocks in those valleys bruised
the arches of my feet, hitchhiked
cross-country in my shoes.
Its gravity spun my compass until
the needle no longer found North, always
pointing backwards to the place I hoped
to never return.
Like a city, Doubt's skies were starless,
black, with no beacon to show
how far I'd come,
how far I'd yet to go.
The only way to travel there was
to crawl, nose dragging
in dirt, following the footfalls
of something just out of sight.
