How small my life has become, bound by the tight orbit of illness,
a path worn from bed to bath and back while fog descends

like the vaporous breath of autumn, skin steaming into the brisk blue,
every nerve and sinew singing one sour note.

Once there were symphonies. Once my world unfolded
like a gas station map tessellating into vast permutations of road—

road like a scar carved through the canyons’ red flesh;
road like a stitch hemming the lake’s ragged edge—

nearly cosmic, how my world expanded, head not yet
spun by centripetal force, body not yet burning toward collapse.

Sometimes I pace the floor of my cabin just to feel that I'm going,
though I don't arrive. Sometimes I walk two miles in any direction

just to see the fields coalesce into a shivering eternity
of fescue and orchard grass, the dappled backs of cows,

mountains smoking on the horizon where I cannot reach them,
white-haired and chiseled as the face of a patriarchal god.

Beneath the tall trees, kaleidoscopic in their sun-shot iterations
of green, a restless wind fills the sails of leaves—nearly bodiless,

they could drift anywhere. The creek tumbles surge over silt,
a locomotive hurtling towards some bright beyond

while I'm left at the station, clutching my coat against the gust
of its going until every idle thought of distance has been swept away,

and in the stillness that follows, I refold the sprawling map
of my hunger to fit within the smallness of my life.

—Zoe Boyer

Poet’s Website

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