Traveler, your footprints are the only road

a poem report

needed this reminder

Dear all, I’m so glad to be back writing in this space,
and trying this new way of writing, a poem report,
since it is somehow easier to get myself to begin
reporting if I have line-breaks and breath
to remember the days full and difficult— right now
I am supposed to be in Chicago at a garden party
at an actual pig-roast (!!) to celebrate my father but I am not there
and instead have COVID, head-achey- and watching
the lightning flicker through the branches of the new trees,
or at least, new to me, here in Cambridge,
a place I’ve fallen madly in love with, even though
I swore I would never live anywhere near Boston,
because it was a city I hated, but it turns out, that story
was wrong, which makes me wonder what other stories
have been wrong, too. I want to write that D & I
are living on borrowed time, but I’m not sure that’s true,
I suppose what I mean is that we are settling into a life
I am not yet sure really gets to be ours. Do you ever feel
like that? It sometimes seems crazy, taking out a student loan
to go to divinity school, with no real plan
except that I want to. It feels a little crazy, to be living on savings
with full-hearted expectation that a job will come through
(in this economy?) because rent has to be paid, because
there is no other option. B once told me a story about a friend
being late for a ferry that would take her off an island.
The ferry only came once a day. There was no other option,
except catching that ferry, otherwise she would be stuck.
So that’s been the motto. Catching the ferry.
No other option. Leaping for the life I want, telling myself
that we would probably be okay even if we DID get stuck
on the island and looked really silly running breathless
towards the dock, arms akimbo. When I see