I met a girl whose mother does not see her..

twirling

around and above the lines painted onto the earth
white lines, side by side,
like walls running the length of our lives

Her mother does not see outside of these lines,
which in the heat of her daughter’s passing,
melt and wash away into a helix of colors

into patterns like sudden doors in a straight corridor smoothed by all the hands of history

By hands that pressed against the structures of their times never to find an opening, hands that reached against an inevitable sense of sliding,
slipping away,
something missing that we try to catch hold of like with a camera,
with anchors of things we throw out into the sea of time
that pile up into towers that lift us

apart

From the perspective of our culture she is naked,
“Put on a coat” they say,
not seeing that she is dancing in the sun

As the towers push uselessly against the gravity of change she sweeps into it,
like a bird only to rise,
on some unseen magic, higher
beyond lines and names,
the sight of things standing still

She is flying into a secret that is kept,
not by intention,
but by all
that we think we know

the cups that, by a certain point in our lives,
we fill
instead of getting a bigger cup

In the hour before the first birds sing
I wake upon the black cloth of the inner contents of my life
I wade through my jealousy and fear and desire,
at first longing for the dawn
but in time I’ve learned to make peace with this quiet city

and this morning when I asked what I was here for,
I found her,
in the middle of the black cloth where God should be,
blissfully engaged with the secret she,
in her way,
has tried to tell,

the thing that dances around the straight lines of language like a fish returning to the sea..

“In which box shall I place you?” people ask,
resting complacently atop the crates into which they believe they have packed the world

I look back from our society,
trapped in the towers,
drunk with their full cups,
I look back to the center and see her,
weightless,
happy,
free

And from the towers, teetering, slowly collapsing into the brink of time, our culture tries to tell me what truth is

and I hear them,

watching their meanings bounce around between the lines men have constructed,
only to dissolve in the deeper layer beyond labels and measurements
where the goddess, from her endless cup, is drinking

and I hear, in another part of my being, a different kind of truth

I blow upon the lines and they scatter like dust,
settling absurdly on the faces of those insisting you need a suit, a degree, to teach,
to matter

And I walk towards her,
knowing that in that vast boundless center where she is dancing,
I will find the remainder of what the knowledges that see the world in pieces,
and so see nothing,
have always stolen from us

My fingers pass through her hair in the darkness,
and she drifts through my hands like the wind

Eyes closed I run,
I run in what may look like circles,
not to catch the wind
but to become it,

like a moth drawn into the fire that burns and returns to something bigger

Her mother does not know her
yet

as my friends and family and society have not known me
or the layers in all of us, still waiting to be accessed,
over a distance we have to explore,
off of our certainties,
down from our egos..
around and around
until we see the lessons we once called sorrows,
the teachers we once called fools

“Just watch her dance”

a voice from above and behind my head says

“Fall in love with what she needs, not what you want”

I met a girl whose mother does not see that she sees God…

how foolish she seems