06/06/05

"I'm wired!," she yelps into the cavernous lecture hall.
Everyone squirms and giggles in their seats.

Her poems do double flips and land in our palms.
We remember our own cold lonely feet,
the last hummingbird we knew,
the way we see ourselves in mirrors.

She looks each one of us in the eye
with that curious, knowing look
and we are bare, floating in her language.
We wrap ourselves into it for warmth
on that delicate precipice between sadness and bliss.

When we go home, we will wonder how she came into our lives.
We will stare at our new faces in mirrors.
We will rub our cold feet together in bed.
We will dream of hummingbirds.