The One Called Weary

There is a version of me who is a poet,
Who leans into uncertainty,
Connects the disparate,
Leans all the way off the edge of meaning
And trusts that someone will catch me
At the bottom,
Will have followed every stray crumb,
And who breathes the dance so deeply
Into every corner of my lungs
That even the stray lunch-dust,
The accidents of a life well-lived
And generously recorded
Mark out the map down,
Balanced in the tapestry.

But I grow so weary
Trying to hold it in my lungs my head my stomach,
My whole body in the tension of
A dance crescendo, crystallized.
So I try instead to put my life
In boxes,
To lay out
A neat arithmetic
Of carried ones
And clean summations–
A proof.
But I am too tired, too, to
Straighten out the knots of thought,
The precariously-balanced dishes spinning
On while I dance still.

Poet, mathematician–
Neither?
I still dance.
There is freedom
In leaning into what the body knows.
This body with no name,
It is not wearied.
It is only twenty-six.