after Ada Limón

Sometimes I like to be a little dramatic,
thinking I would learn how to use these legs like
digits in a typewriter, so unlike the roots of a tree.
I haven’t forgotten that you said there are so many
stories to use, staring up from the bottom of a pool
somewhere in France. I thought about lust –
the desire of life to repeat more life, to be a seashell
to the universe’s body, the same blood forming an ocean
in the aural, looming into a past that felt mostly like
a baggage claim center, an old stolen metaphor.
And so I pick a suitcase. Carry it with me to the
end of the garden, where I try to imprint the
biotope into the poem. My birds and my bees.
And I’m twenty-five now, excited and terrified
of all the things that grow, me included.
I heard the biggest forest on the isles is in Scotland,
but I’m not sure there are any forests here at all.
Those dark living things. As a child, with my father
we visited the cashew of Pirangi, wide like a map.
I remember it was cool underneath, like a city but better.
And it means something to my father that I am here –
yet another hop, a confirmation bias for nomadic nature but
I still feel like that doesn’t explain it. Like I would
have done it anyway, if for no other reason than
to do it. Whatever happens happens. The growth no
longer hampered by sunlight or a perfect state.
Not because of, but despite.