If God gave me one, what is the moment
I would erase?

Would it be the moment I ventured out
of the China exhibit and crossed the crowded street
to the venue painted white, like a wedding, at the
World's Fair in Knoxville, the summer of 1982?
Air Supply was preparing to sing "All Out of Love,"
and I stopped in my tracks seeing you who I had
never met, carrying refreshments. All at once I was
so full of love and for the first time feeling home
here on Earth but pretending all the same I
did not know you as well as I knew myself
as you made small talk and then scurried past
but could not not turn back and smile at me.

Or maybe the next year sitting at the retreat
center on my off day, attending the workshop
and listening to some teacher in a very small room
talk about all the vast stories we had lived and in
you walk, sitting down beside me, something so
familiar and the way I could feel you without
touching and how you found me curious and seemed
not to know it was I who had cleaned your room and
served you ice cream the night before, having been
demoted and divorced from myself through all the ages,
and I who had watched you from the rocking chair
as you walked hand in hand with another?

Would it be two years later in Atlanta where
we would meet again a decade after that. I dream
of the scene in slow motion nearly every night,
the way some force pulled me like a conveyer belt
right to you then slammed me back into myself 
with such force that I could scarcely sing the songs
I loved in the convention hall, standing next to the man
I would marry not knowing I would lie to him when 
I could not bear to know the truth of how I was lying
to myself about not remembering everything to do
with how the decks of time and history were stacked
against me every moment of ten thousand years with you?

Or further still, the year I was five and sitting on 
the monkey swing, telling Robby we could not marry
each other because someone was waiting for me,
then racing around the house like a mad girl who
had lost her way when the rain came pouring down
and all I could remember was two thousand years ago
slipping in the mud as I made my way back to you, 
certain you could not turn your back on me when
we both stood face to face in the truth of our great love?
Had I not told the truth to me and him that day
beneath my favorite tree, perhaps then I could have
held it at bay all the other times in all the years to follow.

What is the moment I would erase,
if God would only give me one?