When Lightning Strikes, Check Your Reflection

after Andrea Gibson’s The Test of Time

I am twenty years old and I haven’t met

any of my disabled friends yet,

which means I still believe what the world has taught me

to believe – that life will not take my breath away… 

unless I am raging against gentle 

good nights, lighting fires 

with the tread of my shoes only to see if I can outrun 

the flames, bringing poems to a knife fight,

cutting myself on the path that I carved 

desperate to see ahead of the curve. 

I won’t know yet that I can live

like velvet wine pouring 

into a lover’s mouth. That lightning 

can live in a gaze and not burn beholder 

or container to ash. That holding it all 

and letting it slip away is the same

when done with love.  

When the woman on the train says

she’d leap onto the tracks if she had

my body, I say I’m sorry that 

you don’t yet have storm medicine. That

you are not lightning. That you cannot fathom

the depths I have explored, the heights I have reached,

a hundred thousand fireflies

at my side. That my darkest night skies

are filled with a million lanterns floating

up to the heavens, no need for prayers

or the thing with feathers

because I am living in ecstasy already. 

Right before I die, 

I’m going to stick out my tongue,

take communion onto my palette:

salt from the sea at the foot of the beach 

where we shed our clothes 

like moths breaking 

from a cocoon, letting

the grey clouds kiss our skin with foggy mouths

as we ran, feeling the cold glide through our blood

when we swam naked.

I’ll add two crumbs of earth, 

one beam of valley-dipping sun as it sighs below 

the horizon – which I bet

tastes like fresh orange peel in an old fashioned, 

then mix with honey – which you can tell was made

from heather-gathered pollen

in a swarm of joyous humming,

one drop of summer rain caught 

in fingers of hawthorn, a glimpse of stardust,

the unbuttoned smile of someone who lives well

in the chambers of my heart.

And at last, I’ll spit this

heady mixture into the dirt. Let those I love

look on as it births sunflowers.