Selected Autobiography
BY GABRIEL WELSCH
We found a garden in its wild state.
We ate bedrock and moved amid rivers.
The first sounds were a dying car
wheezing against winter, plastic bag
window shivering. We played
at life on the move. The summers
reinvented oceans. We stayed
in a succession of sleeping bags.
We practiced legends about cities
near which we lived. The birds
were ones we had always known.
Only the trees would change.
We expressed variant selves
in a calligraphy of nerves.
We discovered all we thought good
mattered less than we thought.
In a rain of conversation, we nested
in the gaps, took draughts of air.
The measures, we know, were
what questions we made.
We met knowing and made possibility.
We found each other in the grasses,
in the gravel at roadside, in the country.
