1st time

 

1st time

What is the idea

that governs blossoming?

                        Jorie Graham

                        I Was Taught Three

1st times don't need us as much

as we need them.  Or even

at all:  listen: every day can be claimed

a 1st or too, last or some

-where along the spectrum, the leaves

reaching from beneath

the very thing that makes them

increase makes them

draw up water from

the dirt (or from if they're tall

enough, the sky)? Are you

concerned with things

like 1st days? Do you need

them the way you need

buttons or zippers or eye

hooks to keep and contain

a neat measure of the one

place that maybe you've been

working all this time

to be free from?  Imagine: Shakers

made wooden or metal hooks to hang

their hats their capes their chairs

their brooms, same as most,

but with their neat air 

of simplicity it becomes profound

to sweep beneath every-

thing that has been raised 

from the dead

spaces of the floor where 

motes of suspended dust 

are thrust up to the boxed

-in light and spread by

rising and routine earth turning

degrees across the floor.  1st

mornings.  1st evenings.

Will you be willing

to concede

really the only thing that's needed

is that little gaff

screwed into the coatroom

wall jutting out ready

as ever empty or not but intending

to suspend all that neat

simplicity of our most precious

things to wait for us 

while we busy

our fingers

1st then our feet and every

intimacy in between

with being touched 1st, 1st, 1st

and then washing

the drug of it off our skin

and feeling ourselves

gathered up from our roots

like it inevitably does and will, 

like called water,

and we go out naked

but clothed, taking our 1st

openings, now closed

and go home for the one time

utterly alone.