The Unfinished Letter

The pen lies on my desk. I meant

to write her name upon the morning air,

but here my feet have carried me instead

through bracken thick with yesterday's rain.

The words I planned sit patient in the desk drawer:

My dearest Mary, how are the red birds this spring...

But spring has turned to something else while walking,

and the red birds have long since flown.

My shoes know better than my racing mind

the rhythm that unravels knotted thought.

Left, right, and then the pause where rabbits

dart between the trees, and I am caught

mid-sentence in the grammar of the earth.

What was I saying? Something about home,

perhaps, or how the light falls differently

when you have been away too long. But I

am neither gone nor have I arrived.

The path divides ahead. I'll choose, in time.

For now, let me remain here in the choosing,

where every step might lead to anywhere

and every breath is counted like drops of rain that fell

on the ground I have not walked across before.

The letter waits. Her name waits. Words like flowers

I'll gather when this wandering is done.

But not yet, not while I am walking through

the very middle of everything I cannot say.