Amnesia

Two souls compare notes,
their stories punctuated with fingers along jawlines
and hands pressing into the wood floor
and into the earth below
from which they grew.
Why they have to fight so to keep their roots in the black dirt
is one of the mysteries on the table.

The skin dissolves
the curve of a nose and
the heavy fall of hair across a shoulder
become Clark Kent’s glasses,
and I wonder how I was ever fooled by
their assumed identities,
how I was ever deafened to what seemed
only the senseless chatter of birds.

We share stories like children,
like boys who share a pocket of treasure—
a penny
a bottlecap
a bird’s skull
a flattened frog—
all equally laudable discoveries,
clues to the mystery,
though the wonder warps into weariness somehow
as the treasures are found in spite of.

Is it because as our hands grow larger,
it’s easier for treasures to slip through our fingers?

We have forgotten wings;
the horizon lies before our perception;
we are not created, but creation.

Is anyone else seeing this?

Two souls compare notes.
How did I miss this all these years?