Cicada

I remember sixteen,
young and almost nothing:
too afraid to chart myself and yet
too proud for annexation by approval.
Knowing nothing of everything,
I had to become a reflection
faces turning
the leaves of a book running
deliquescent
before I knew what that meant—
to become like water,
to become a spirit.

Where are they now, those faces I stole,
the names and voices I loved and hated
out of self-ignorance?

Jaded photos
in a yearbook I never bought,
they were the auguries of innocence.
I cannot read them, now as I could not then,
for the same reason
I can no longer distinguish
spirits from ghosts:
past the cartography of letters,
they are both formless

inhale exhale

To live, we must stop
breathing.

This is the only difference, at twenty-two:
that I can label what I was and I wasn’t,
can shepherd the ghosts of my selfhood
about the caves and forests of my geography
where, I now know, dwells no mythology;

just a cicada,
arrived out of its skin too early
for spring sings,
alone, and so close
to being nothing at all.