do-over

one year


your first trip around the sun
you may not have known you were traveling
an ellipse, though you’re familiar
with elements of its geometry –
parabola of breast correlated
to the concavity of your small, warm mouth

now you’re rounding out your orbit
beginning your second loop through
the same set of seasons,
three hundred and sixty degrees of green,
tomorrow you’ll begin to see pattern
in the stretch of light through summer days
and its elastic snap back in fall

you already know so much of the moon’s routine –
forever filling and draining, how the sun can shatter
into a thousand stars on a cloudless night
only to be repaired while you sleep,
and you’ve learned your family’s phases,
that a face may wane – a moment, an hour –
but will always soften approaching perigee with you