Becoming / Lost

My friends become landscapes
and in them I wander
climb search their faces for mirrors
becoming
ecstatically lost to briefly find
myself--
that ghost in the ephemeral wink.

Amidst these mountains and rivers,
these forests and valleys,
we lay our words next to our words
as a fuse of chemical speech
that ignites Time--
reactive synthetic metamorphic.

And in those fires
I find my maps and hopes
and self-portraits and tongues
already tossed in as fuel
by that enviable who
I've never met long enough to thank.

"We can't even imagine what we must sacrifice."

Traces vanish,
but when I peer in
at the mirrors walling my heart,
I find them patterned
with prints of your fingertips
and feet and minds and lips--
building me once again
as the visible surface
I reach to touch.

A butterfly's wings beat
the delicacy of hurricanes, leaving
my maps obsolete
in this new,
this rewrought land.

Nowhere is Now/Here



by jerry gordon
May 2003