Go as a River

by Shelley Read

The landscapes of our youths create us, and we carry them within us, storied by all they gave and stole, in who we become.

But I’ve come to understand how the exceptional lurks beneath the ordinary, like the deep and mysterious world beneath the surface of the sea.

But I didn’t, and this made all the difference in the world. Instead, I took one slow step forward and then another, intuitively feeling the significance in each choice to lift, extend, then lower a foot.

love is a private matter, to be nurtured, and even mourned, between two beings alone. It belongs to them and no one else, like a secret treasure, like a private poem.

Then he stood and eyed me so long I thought I’d melt like chocolate in the last rays of sun reaching low across the porch.