[Editor's Note: "[I Dreamed, I Slept]" is taken from a manuscript entitled Mary is a River and is written in the imagined voice of Mary Magdalene.]

I dreamed, I slept.

I traveled into the folds
of the earth and my hair thinned

and my body, until I became more
breath than form.

Only then did I begin my return
to the light that filters the world.

Speaking like this, thumbing for a stem of truth,
is like trying to find a fossil.

I locate the ridge where the vertebrae was,
blow away dust of stomach,

epistles, a village, and what
is underneath is not so much a body

but a movement, a drum of the blood.

I step in again, become a river

stirring history’s silt, sliding over
stories slick with sludge and with moss.

I’ll have to wear them down
to before I was.

Before he was.
Before we humans moved out

across the land in rivulets
branching up and over

the cracked hand.