Have your childhood dreams become you?

Do you travel in the spirit world from creek to bayou,

from lake to riverbed, whooping and hollering in the dark

while the rest of us sleep?

I always pictured myself,

in these dreams somewhere with you.

Smelling the pine needles embedded

in the damp earth;

ignoring the hiking boots that rub a thin red line

into the persistence of shins.

Guilty after some imagined marital transgression,

returning.

Always finding you;

I could feel you from decades and miles away,

post-holing through the snow and trees;

sinking deeper through that commencing punch; each step more single-minded

like bread that has risen

soft and yielding at the top, dense where it meets its fictile captor.

Perhaps none of us were meant to be grounded.

Up and down the mountain passes, 

then falling on my knees

when I could hear your voice again.

I bury my frozen fingers into the crook of your arm,

and you hold them there

through the wind and the ice we are thawed

like we were twenty years ago

not enough years ago.

We discover that my fingertips haven’t turned,

and that we are children again, forgiven of our ebbs

in this place where it is white

and sometimes cold;

this place where we are new

and never old. 

And I hope that I am the one out of this darkness always climbing the stairs,

and that you are the one in the light,

forever turning around.