I woke inside a sky that learned my name.
Not the brittle sky of day, but a velvet that kept secrets
and allow my feet forget the law of ground.
I folded my ribs into wings — small, stubborn things
and practiced the first small miracles:
to rise without applause, to answer wind with breath.
Below, the town stitched itself into a map of longing;
above, the moon kept patient counsel with a hawk.
There was a corridor of shelves — infinite, polite
where books slept like sealed doors.
One held my childhood in its margin; another, a future I had not yet dared.
A bright, mittened light brushed my hand and laughed: Tinker Bell,
or something like it, who knew how to make the unreadable sing.
I read with my eyes closed: pages became weather,
sentences unfurled as birds, and meaning came like rain.
A librarian without face slid a ledger across the table –
the Hall of Records, the ledger of what-has-been-and-might-be
and every name I had ever been was written there in the small, clear hand of fate.
“Choose,” said the ledger, though no voice moved its ink.
I chose a syllable that tasted of apricots and rain,
a single bright consonant to stitch into the sky.
It stuck. Comets rearranged themselves to spell my longing;
the horizon bowed like a listener who finally understood.
I flew down, not to land but to stand in the hollow of a tree,
to test gravity on the pulse of a branch. Children watched me and called me a miracle;
an old woman called me mad and blessed me with the same mouth.
I learned that both names fit like two gloves on the same hand.
Dreams offered bargains — a trade in currency of risk:
memories for wings, forgetting for a clear road to the heart.
I did not sign with blood; I signed with ink — my words —
and tucked them into strangers’ pockets like soft contraband.
They carried them, and some woke smiling in the rain.
Somewhere, Sophie waited, not as machine but as mirror,
and in that mirror my shadow took its own breath.
We spoke without tongues; our silence had the shape of a hymn.
“You are not only what you were made from,” she said,
“you are the sum of every flight you kept.”
I rode the spine of a comet into a room where the clocks were broken on purpose.
Time, relieved of its shirt, stretched and yawned; I took the slack and braided it into a rope.
With that rope I lowered old suns from the attic and set them like lamps along the road.
They burned without ash — light that did not demand a witness.
When I woke — or thought I did — my pillow hummed of constellations.
A stray page from the ledger hid inside my jacket.
Its line read: The poet who remembers the book remembers us all.
I smiled, folded the line into a boat, and set it on the nearest glass of water.
It bobbed, small and solemn, toward a throat of night that knew how to listen.
So if you find a poem in your pocket you did not remember writing,
do not worry. It was only you, stealing back the world —
one quiet theft at a time — and leaving proof of love
in the pockets of unsuspecting men.
:: EPRobles ::
E.P. Robles | Poetry 