It’s as if I’d been stumbling
through a fallacious forest.
My head in a thick duping
overstory.
But I knew it when I saw it–
the pasture clearing,
dotted with cow dung,
some old and seeping
some new and glistening
in the sun.
I trekked the gray trail left
by the herds hooves
and teetered on tufts
of trusted green—
I was expecting to find you there,
tottering where I teetered
evening me out,
but not your tumbling me
into love—
into a different kind of symmetry—
with your compass brain
and long legs and curls that run
through my fingers
like the basin water I use
to awaken my face.
You reckoned me, sprang me
from a mapless wilderness,
as if I’d accepted as truth
the imprecision of an antique globe—
a flawed rendering.
What I thought the world was like.
Deborah Wanzer
Deborah Wanzer lives and writes in Boston, Massachusetts. Her most recent work can be found in the anthology Poems for the Solstice (Farmer-ish Press) and The New Republic.