It starts with two ropes tied between two poplar trees / creating a gateway / a portal cutting through the veil I was only then learning to see / imagine me, eight years old with a dull-bladed hunting knife / a hand-me-down with a handle that smelled like car keys or pennies mixed with palm sweat / imagine me, taking off my clothes, folding each item neatly into a pile / black denim, a t shirt, shoes, and socks / I am nothing but underwear and fear / facing the ritual I’ve dreamed into being in order to see the last times of my memory.

The last time I was (t)here I buried my dead with uncalloused hands, glovelessly planting my grandfather like a spudding tuber in the Georgia land — nothing but unyielding red clay to cover him in his vault of decay. Where I’m from, we throw dirt on caskets with bare hands. Sometimes we cry and beg at the graveside. Where I’m from the men carry the dead like a burden of honor, as if medals were awarded for pallbearing. We are a people so eager for another life, yet fearful of the possibilities of our own torch lights.

I touch the spell / my palm again the invisible wall of air / and seeing my last time of the other side, I recoil / the ripples of my fingerprints cling there / the grooves of my identity, the same as waves / and I’m cold / shivering in skivvies / shaking my blade / what is there for me to find on the other side of time / I see, also, the first time.

I was born an explorer: an earthship astronaut ready to take on the world, and at three I took off walking, marching with my little legs, in hopes of finding something new. Perhaps to find the elves and trolls I knew were hiding in the leafy branches and the hollowed stumps and in the tangled briar of blackberry and muscadine — I knew new life was waiting just outside the porch and the dirt road and the mailbox and the driveway. Somewhere in the woods, I’d find another way. But instead, at three, I’m crying. Lost. Lonely. Fearful. I’m waiting, drenched in tears, for my father to save me from the towering trees — the pines that climb the ladder of the sky up so far it obscures heaven. And black limbs against blue, against cotton clouds, I’m in the arms of safety — of my father — and I’m home again, and in that home for the last time.

I’m blown back / dirtying the white cotton seat of my ass / it’s all bone and alabaster flesh mixing hard into the dead leaf loam / this, the gift of my portal of rope and tree, showing me more than I had bargained for / somehow me, the history of my weakness / the history of my need / safety and passion mixing with the urge to leave / imagine me again, dusting off my ass and checking the rope for tautness and stability / I pluck it like catgut string / thinking back to another rope and another escape attempt.

Once, at maybe six or seven, I wanted to fly and took my father’s old ratty ropes and made a spiderweb in my jungle gym. I thought, not even knowing the word, that if I could find my center of gravity and tie a rope there, I’d balance in midair. I knew in the logic of my childhood that my top was heavier than my hips, so I looped one rope around my waist and another around my neck — then leapt into nothing with swift bare feet that couldn’t feel the aluminum bar I’d stood on. And for a moment I dangled between summer blue sky and spring green grass, the sun, a warm friend greeting my back — until the rope around my middle snapped and I hung instead by my chin, groping and gasping as the tallest of the blades tickled the tips of my big toes. Somehow I had the breath to yell so I yelled — my mother running down hill with the look of a Valkyrie, lifting me, and giving me breath for the last time.

These portals are made of wishing and memory — they go as far forward as they go back / once in high school / my face in sweat-stinking pillows / adolescent / ear buds and discman lulling me / I saw a future me — no ropes needed, and no trees / but this me / naked me / forest magic creature communing with the creeks / I collected one of each / maple leaf oak leaf / poplar blossom / a branch with twenty eight pine needles / and two sprigs of hemlock / because time magic is most powerful in evergreens / I wished to see and to be / and the portal between the trees opened for me.

Packing boxes with as much dust as stuff — half the weight of every book I pack is memories, or at best just simply dirt. But I have to pack lightly. People in New York have so little — my adolescent vision didn’t tell me that: it just whispered “New York” in my ear and showed me walking, the omniscient view of god, a good head of hair and a mosaic marble compass inlayed on the street, me checking my wrist for the time, in a hurry to be some place. Ten years later, filling boxes, I wonder if I’ll find such a space in my wanderings of the new place.

I arranged sigils in the river rock / a preparatory step / necessary for aligning time / one on the creek bank / another on the tiny island / and a last in the fork of two nameless waterways / I left myself a pebble breadcrumb trail back to my home / following the curves of the old logging road / in case I wanted to go back / but I’d rather look forward.

It is the last night I will sleep in my parent’s house, as my parent’s child, in the bed of my youth. It is the last night I will close my eyes under this roof. It is my last summer of dragonflies and tiger lilies and elephant ears and lightening bugs, my last summer of sweet tea and kudzu and mountains the shape of children playing under green-brown braided rugs. The last time I see every quarry cave and pig farm, every hay barn and baptist church, every apple tree and rain-muddied river as somehow mine.

A reflection appears / a final image / another version of myself / equally naked / equally vulnerable / however, I’m grown / a man / hair on my knuckles and shoulder blades / staring back through the portal / his movements mimic my own / a perfect mirror / his right hand following my left only two feet taller / tracing something invisible / his ropes are tied between the alley walls / between two buildings / his background, one of bricks, not trees / his feet on trash and cement, not dead leaves / and me here me now presses my palm against that of me then me there / everything is one thing / I am as much here as I am there.