When Mister Rogers told us to "look for the helpers," I always wanted to be one that somebody found. In some small way, then, I knew I'd never be lost.
You always used to say the deepest darkness is driving down North Carolina backroads on a moonless night.
I almost hit the mountain lion as it raced my brights to the other edge of my canyon’s cliffs.
Your dark knows nothing of the distance between two mountains, darling.
Let alone what you broke when you left.
Someone is singing John Denver in the desert this morning. I smile so big that my sunburned lip cracks and bleeds. My next bite of orange is so sweet it stings.
They call you an idea to make me fall out of love with you.
You would love who I have become
But I had to leave you to be anything at all
Bittersweet, those bits
So much of me you never knew,
So much more you’ll never know.
I’ve got four years left until you've never touched this body. I’ll hold my new heart in my hands and whisper, “I told you so, darling.”
Sometimes you have to spit on silver to make it shine.
You made my favorite songs all taste like you.
Just like every other morning, just like every other night
I stood in our meadow and held out a hopeful hand
I pulled the blushing air into my lungs
Letting it leave as a wilder thing; part prayer, part cry, part promise
Our old oak tree caught my message to you in her great golden arms
Graciously scattering its starlight across the skies
As I fell back into the flowers to wait and to wonder
I watched that glittering galaxy become a sweet snow
All of my stories melted back into my skin, until all at once,
At the twining touch of evergreen eyes beside me, a new one began
Now and always and evermore,
Just like every other morning, just like every other night
We wrap ourselves into a tangle of truth
It’s a wilder thing, that knot;
Part prayer, part cry,
Part promise -
To never let you go.
I found a tree that hums beneath your hands
It has honeybees for a heart and boy, those wings beat better than blood
The wild berry tangles are sticky and sweet as the sure summer heat
Where we’ll wait with the woods till the sky falls
Let’s drop it all, too, darling, here -
Place your palm on the small of my back and kiss me like a movie, like you mean it, like you know it's true,
I know I do.
We could run away someplace that is only our own
Write the stories there that we’ll tell with shining eyes - our children’s children sprawled by the sitting room stove
Could we carve our years from the pines we'll climb?
Set them on the mantle in a little line of our love - they’ll make this house a home
Say a prayer for each one that you never forget
What you know now,
I know you do.
One day at a time, they say, so I’ll bring you every clock I can find
With all of those hours we'll have a lifetime to wander before I meet you for more
Have you ever seen how the sun-tangled leaves look a lot like stained glass?
I want a love like that light - one of resolve and rapture and shining warmth and homegrown heartache
Not the kind that breaks
I mean the soul-shaking sort that hurts simply because you know it is about the only thing real enough to feel for forever, and, well,
I know we will.
I want to hold hands with something practical and permanent
Long scrawled letters or the jar of apricots my grandmother always kept in her fridge
I just need to know something real
I tied my hope into a knot
Strung it up and called that tightrope tomorrow
I’ll wait while you waver, but,
There’s someplace I’d love for you to see.
The world taught me well to fear the dark
Now when I walk into mine, I hold hands with the trees
They tell me that if you let yourself grow where you're scared
You'll soon see how to stand strong till morning breaks
I'm getting braver in these wintering woods
One shadowy mile at a time
I'm learning that silence isn't lacking,
Its cacophony is rather deafening
But if you let the trees teach you how to listen
You can begin to parse apart its truths
So now love, what does your silence say?
Our meaning is sieved of starlight and story
Does it swallow you or does it sing?
How almost anything could happen at anytime?
And yet here we are, becoming the one that does.
The church on the corner in the Avenues has a bell that rings three minutes before each hour
The only other time I've seen God arrive so early was the morning I went West
I talked to tomorrow while the sun rose
I asked if she ever gets lonely with everyone enveloped in our amber todays
She shook her head with smiling eyes and told me about us.
Back when I knew you best, I was little and lying in an earthy bed of autumn leaves. I told you I would see you soon, someday, and that I’d write you always. I closed my eyes as the maples made haloes of the sun.
The first time I recognized your smile, you were wearing a "Vote for Pedro" teeshirt in the cafeteria. Your hair had a fringe that curled at the ends and you always ran away during the slow songs. You liked to make me laugh and that little warmth sent me wonder. When you were just him, I pulled all the pink gel pen love notes from my diary and tore them to an angry flurry. I missed you then and sent you my favorite songs on a mix CD that I drew all over with Sharpie flowers, leaving the lines empty, because I couldn’t remember your name. I knew you'd understand.
The second time, it was your strength that I saw. You were a forward on the varsity soccer team and two grades above me. You asked me to prom during AP Biology class and during the summer that you worked cutting grass at the golf course, I told you I loved you. You showed me your hiding places and asked me for mine. When you were just him, I put my corsage in a shoebox and listened to Coldplay for weeks. My roommate asked me to play some happier music. I asked you to hurry. I poured myself into poems as long as I could write, hoping they'd grow far enough from my pen to reach your heart.
The last time, I saw a glimmer of your love, and that little bit of your light was more than enough - I was so sure. I left our first date and told my mom I'd marry you one day. Six years later, I told you the very same thing while my heart screamed to stop. You played guitar in a dive bar band and always made me feel so small. When you were just him, I nearly broke under the weight of what I'd given away to the wrong heart.
So, I wrote to you. I wrote to you every day for years. I begged you to appear. I waited. I looked for you in train stations and coffee shops and on mountainsides. I prayed over the pages of each book that I read, asking if you loved those words, too - though of course, I knew you did.
Tonight, I watched the mountains make haloes of the sun. I wondered at how everything beautiful grows in circles; the seasons shaping tree trunks, the water’s surface breaking beneath stones, the orbits of moons and galaxies, the ring my coffee cup left on the table that morning, that day in the leaves reaching the moment I'll finally know.
I smiled and whispered a question to the space between us.
I waited. I wondered. I wrote to you.
I want a love like the trees and the water
I'll grow in the shapes of what moves you
This is where you'll bleed the best, he tells me
Tracing where blue beats beneath, his gaze locked on my own
But if I do my job right, it shouldn't hurt a bit.
I wonder if the first places I called “home” reminded me of you
Now I stand in this doorway, delicately tracing the frame
Everything before was your echo.
Slip your boldest thrift shop dress over your shoulders and wonder at all the lives it may have already lived before.
Curl the corner of your mouth when you think of first kisses on porch steps, the drone of a drive-in while pinkies twine on the bumper of a rickety ride that's really more rust than baby blue.
Or maybe it was something more like today: the shy autumn breeze rowing your window on its hinge, an oar in the stream, sending gauzy ripples tangling through your hair. You sit in a slice of sunlight on a worn wooden floor, finding yourself by losing these words.
Put this away.
Ask if it knows what moments it might hold you in.
Ask your skin the same question.
Curl the corner of your mouth and carefully paint rouge between two laughing lips because that little girl loved everything bright. And, since soft smiles have never been what you're known for,
Always choose the red.