Jackie Bartley
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  In the Rooms Where We're Born

  In the rooms where we’re born,
  there’s something we’ve forgotten.
  We may have retained it until
  we learned to speak.
  But long before we missed it,
  it was gone.

  And so, like swans, our necks
  curved into questions,
  we mourn the loss of something
  we can’t know.

  But sometimes, in the corner of your eye,
  I see it, memory of a thing too large
  to keep.
                It lasts for less than a second,
  swift as the ache of a stitch pulled out
  around the wound it healed.

  I know you then as we all know one another,
  a wondrous fleshy ghost, a walking dream,
  and love a word the snow makes
  when it falls.