Things

Do we hide our souls in things
to keep them safe till after our hearts leave us?

Do we always know that
​that will happen?

Is mine hidden in the dry, powder-white-brown blades of grass
I remember stabbing my feet on in summer?
Or in those cracked hot pavements?
Or the bleached-baking tar roads
gravelling in the light & dark?

Maybe in the hot sand, sinking away as I
pushed up that same dune for the hundredth time,
or in the broken barnacles
stabbing and cutting while I breathed 
the salt and water deeply, into
the lung hollows under my heart?

Can we loose our souls through our feet by accident?

Did I hide a part of my soul in that sagging, rusted fence that
I never forgot seeing those huge bugs with the unrealistically long legs
crawling through?

What a strange place to hide a soul.

& what about in those white flowers?  The ones with the egg-yellow centres that hung heavily at my sister's front door & I never learned the names of after all those years because you don't have to call things that are close?

(It's funny how I remember most things best
with the souls of my feet
and some things only with the backs of my
eyelids)

Maybe I just left my soul in the air.
Hanging like the prayers of a thousand years hang in the Notre Dame;
like a cloud of pollen dust being blown from the field 
into the forest, slowly, still visible with the other lost souls bumping up against 
each other there.

&

Maybe that's where all souls go.

At the end.

...

I look for my soul more now;
now that my heart has grown stronger & harder.

The softness of it is rarer & more beautiful to me.

From 'Things' in Homeland