swimming further and further back
in this dream, hearing  
the breathing of the trees,
the chorus of your ancestors,   
memory walking in the dark,
that sudden tonnage—
the current circling out in rings—
the vastness of all that has been lost.   

Hold your heart like a flower,   
give over wholly to magic,  
a golden key looking for what it will open:
the mercy of rain
in a wet, green field,
the scent of an unlocked gate.  

Love the full weight of yourself,
a map of wild intention,
the time of your radiance,
that moment of stretching up, up,
unhinged and singing, releasing a tide.
Here is what you hunger for: 
the blue bowl of
sweet, secret abundance.  

We are all here together   
running into our own beginning—
what is beyond words—   
a thirst, a flood.  
Let the overflow catch and keep,
a seed growing.    

~  Cento poem, including the title, from lines/ phrases of W.S. Merwin’s poetry collection Garden Time, Lia Purpura’s poetry collection Stone Sky Lifting, and Anne Sexton’s poetry collection Transformations