What We Circle
I’ve consulted the Muses
and they tell me the path is circular.
We circle the wagons,
circle the tipis,
circle the fire,
the frightened child,
the stories we tell ourselves.
We’d circle the buffalo
if we could—
round them with our bodies,
our hunger,
our prayers,
our ancient need
to make a boundary
between us and the wild.
We name ourselves
inside closed, tight circles:
family,
tribe,
nation,
faith,
friend,
enemy.
Ancient rituals
turn and return.
We walk the same ground
our ancestors walked,
drawing invisible rings
in the dust.
Universally,
we practice in circles—
in ironic, toxic,
tangible realms,
flawed to the extreme,
yet infinite as the stars
that seem to wheel above us.
The circle forgives no beginning.
The circle promises no end.
It is the mouth of the well,
the eye of the storm,
the wheel beneath civilization,
the coin in the hand,
the planet beneath our feet.
We worship the sun
and the moon.
We raise stones
into circles
and then circle the stones,
dancing around what we cannot explain,
dance beneath an eclipse
of one circle passing
across another.
Perhaps this is why
we keep returning:
to the fire,
to the wound,
to the altar,
to the argument,
to the person we swore
we would never become.
Do not dismiss circles easily.
Not in secret.
Not in anger.
Not in some extreme fit of rage.
For even rage
has a circumference.
Even grief
comes around.
Even our complaints—
our grievances,
our midnight theories,
our magnificent human talent
for bitching—
move in circles.
Around and round
we go,
inventing new roads
that somehow lead us back
to the same old center.
And perhaps the profoundest circle
is this:
we leave the beginning
believing we are leaving,
only to discover
we have been traveling
toward it all along.
