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We can't hold everything, but we try / sometimes, to hold them longer than we should. / Over there in the windowsill, you'll find / a bicycle and sidecar made of wire, / and an oblong stone from a beach in France, / as if, as if, as if I remember, / as if I could look back with these glass eyes. / Some things, you'll hold as long as you can stand. / That jar, I tried to fill with the river. / In this scar, I would have fossilized fire. / But look, I've held my breath under the ice, / and I came in here alone and naked, / with just my feet, my voice, and my blue sky.
originally published in The Denver Quarterly