Meeting Place

Sweet garments of memory,
I don’t know how to follow you.

Crossing and recrossing
the borders.

I was a mermaid once
for ten minutes

in a four-year-old’s eyes
and became one

then

and now

when I remember

and emerge.

From the water
laughing
hair like seaweed.

Crowned princess, twice
one night in North Carolina
one in Illinois

my identity

so easy

Indian princess

the one in Peter Pan.

Refuses
like him
to grow old.

Simple distances those.

But these.

31

Kimberly L. Blaeser

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