So, this is how you pray.
A long soak in a woody pine.
Tumbling over mounds of moss and musty leaves
gathering totems
worshiping the very earth on your back stargazing.
The dark is a hazy look at what is firm and rock solid.

I’d like to think that all the days I spent in our untended woods kept a diary in my heart
close as close to childhood and the wonder that dove deep inside me.
A zillion questions were blown in between the weeds that had become trees and their younger brothers…
scrawny and wild like me.

I dreamed till it was a skill
and if they were prayers they must have filled the creek like a million tadpoles.
And if my dreams live in me today
it is the trees that held them together in a string of lights that stretch into time
As they couldn’t be contained –
not by length or breadth
bewildered then
bewildered now
the string of lights were so carefully set and woven into time.

Some pierced the very core of me like blinds opening in the morning.
I couldn’t want anything or not –
that wasn’t the point.

Dreaming by the creek is not different than jumping in head first.
The prickers that caught my legs and incised the scars –
I can see them today.
They are the wounds from dreams that fell to the bottom of the creek
and still
along the shore, live endless lights.