The Poem You’ve Been Waiting For

I saw then the white-eyed man leaning in to see if I was ready yet to go where he has been waiting to take me. I saw then the gnawing sounds my faith has been making and I saw too that the shape it sings in is the color of cast-iron mountains I drove so long to find I forgot I had been looking for them, for the you I once knew and the you that was born waiting for me to find you. I have been twisting and turning across these lifetimes where forgetting me is what you do so you don’t have to look at yourself. I saw that I would drown in a creek carved out of a field our incarnations forged the first path through to those mountains. I invited you to stroll with me there again for the first time, to pause and sprawl in the grass while I read to you the poem you hadn’t known you’d been waiting to hear. I read until you finally slept and all your jagged syntaxes softened into rest. You’re always driving so far from me towards the me I worry, without you, is eternity. I lay there, awake, keeping watch while you snored. I waited, as I always seem to, for you to wake up and come back to me.