The Fall

When my knees and breasts absorbed the force

of my passion and bike careening down

that hill in the cedar grove I knew—the faulty 

gear, rain, sunscreen, eye—each element chosen—

my pathetic, tiny violence. Or penance 

for breaching the sanctity of movement—attempting 

to control both directions. No, the permission 

my body needed to enter itself, feel its corners 

again like a child. I returned to the hill convinced 

my being was what I felt & that which touched me; that I would find 

pieces of skin in the path; that the path remembered me 

when I wasn’t there. I saw how the cedar trees fall— 

intersecting—one positioned above the other. I thought

we were just like them—thorned, fragrant,  

over.