If tomorrow is a place I hope the sun shines sweet and gold
That your hands on my skin are as warm as the light
And your eyes are kind and bright and shining with love
If this house is a home
Let it be ours
I would like to hold your hand in the hallway
Any hallway
This polished tile, locker-laidened corridor of junior high school
The Louvre or the Taj Mahal
I would just like to hold your hand
Kiss you on the cheek
Or the lips if we’re feeling really gutsy
Wear your hoodie
Your baseball hat indoors
Backwards
Tipped to the side
Let’s slow dance
In the tarp-covered gymnasium, your hands on my shoulders, mine on your waist
Because we don’t know how to slow dance
I want to let you steal my sketchbook as if it wasn’t the one thing I wanted most in the world
To tell you how frustrated I am with the boy that I love when that boy is really you and all that I want is so desperately for you to heed your own advice
Touch my hand under the armrest of a movie theater seat
Because making out is so seventies or so high school or so grownup or so gross or so…
Touch my hand
Because I know the static electricity that will pass between us could ricochet off the moon,
I want to wait to really know you.
You are far too precious to hold before we know what we are worth.
Before we understand the gravity of letting go and dismiss the mere suggestion of that idea as lunacy
I want to go to the third floor of a building, the restricted area
The basement, the roof
Shout in the library
Be late for class
Miss the bell
I mean bus, I mean train.
I want to love
How they always told us not to love in the student handbook,
the right way.
I missed a lot of bells, busses, and trains, to reach you,
I was late for a lot more than class
Late to say “I love you” to all the wrong hearts
But that hesitancy was all just the pause between the prayer and the amen
Waiting.
For here,
for you,
and now.
I will love the way your flannels feel against my summer skin, hiding me from the window’s soft breeze
The way I gently pull your glasses from where they’ve slipped on the bridge of your nose, after you’ve fallen asleep on the sofa to the drone of NPR
The way you bring me coffee in bed on lazy Sundays, just enough cream to turn it the color of my childhood room’s walls
How I will make dinner with you, sipping white wine and kissing by the counter
Our little breakfast table with the yellow cotton cover, and the mason jar of wildflowers I refuse to let go stale
Our bookshelf full of creaky bookshop treasures
The way you will dip me upside down, Dirty Dancing style, as you kiss me hello after work
How you won’t mind my incessant singing as if no one can hear
I will love the sunlight bathing our window seat in the bedroom
The old record player’s putter when the vinyl is through
Our trips to the market and the bouquet you slip into the basket while I’m counting coupons
The way our dog’s feet will pad softly across our aching wooden floors
The box of old letters in our dresser drawer, from times both oceans and little living rooms apart
The mingling of our handwriting on our grocery list by the fridge
How you still send me a postcard every time you travel
The way I will pull all of the covers to my side every night in my sleep, but how you will forgive me time and time again
I will love kissing your shoulders, running my lips over the freckles sprinkled on the nape of your neck
Our bathtub with the clawed feet and my organic lilac soap that you refuse to admit you use
My Hunter boots towering over your loafers beside the door
The tree house we’ll build together in the old oak tree and the nights we’ll spend there, counting falling stars
I will love Billie Holiday, Ella Fitzgerald and Louis Armstrong—dancing barefoot across the kitchen, my cheek to your shoulder
The farmer’s stand on the corner of the street, and the carton of strawberries that won’t make it the walk home
Christmastime strolling the avenues with breathy snow drifts settling in our hair, Vince Guaraldi flavoring every moment and our little tree with the crooked star
The chalkboard by the door where I’ll leave you sweet thoughts
Our jar of pennies for a rainy day
The sound your keys make in the door when you return home
The notes you slip into my work-bag while I’m in the shower
I will love the quiet rain stuttering against the bedroom window on soft nights, while jazz pours from the speakers in the corner
The whistle of the kettle, two cups waiting nearby
The way you drift off with a book draped across your chest
Our collection of photographs, scattered across every surface in mismatched frames
How your beard will turn my chin rosy, but I’ll keep on kissing you
Pressing our palms together and watching your fingers fold over mine
I will love the sweet strum of your guitar from the den as I sit down to write
The way your eyes light up when you laugh
The way I light up when you laugh
Our wicker basket of laundry after doing the wash, our linens tangled together
The bouquet of dried lavender from the fields near our home, hung over the stove
The night in the middle of winter when we built a castle of quilts and cushions
My grandfather’s apron that I’ll wear as I cook, and your banter of domesticity that will earn you a light-hearted swing from the wooden spoon in my hand
My little green seedlings growing by our open window, waiting to be planted in the window box on the balcony
I will love the days when we get into the car with a map, a collection of music, and a camera—setting off with an undetermined location in mind
I will,
love,
You.
I used to watch stars and wait for them to fall
But that isn’t how the world works,
or the sky.
Between your lines I write
Wartime letters begging you to stay
Morse code movements, still tap dancing love
Counting knots in my belay
And I’m so scared to play that song
I miss the floor beneath my feet
While my ears ring with church bells
You sound lonely in my sleep
That silver shine river takes us and
Here we’re soft as water
Prayers and stories to be found
You, are yesterday’s daughter
Dear love
Dear sun and moon and wooden spoons
Here are the stars in my curled palm
For you alone
When love leaves you
I hope you remember how your eyes can shine
See the spine of the mountain
Cradling the sun and your sorrow
Tomorrow you will find new ways to unfold
To massage the creases cutting through cloth
Hang it all on a rope between pines
For breezes to swing and lend new life
Here is your hope,
Here is your heart
Just hold on.
Stay there and don’t say a word
Ethereally, eternally I watch you lift the floor boards
Hush and hide
Some strange melody tickles at the back of my throat
A prayer or a promise or what is anything at all
The bigness of opening
So peculiar in its allure
She tumbles down the hillside
Brambles and brush thorns biting her legs
I see you sometimes there
Your arms outstretched and those hickory hazel eyes
I see you sometimes there
Beg you to let me through
To break open the humid haze between us
Let me sink into some kind of certainty
What are you so afraid of, child?
Light cannot be held or fractured
You are a mirror
Look up and light the sky
There is nothing here to lose.
Happiness was once the kiss of monarch wings on little palms
A cup of milk warmed on the stove and sprinkled with cinnamon
Quiet corners where I would fold myself into the warmth of the world
Exchanging darkness for snow sparkle with each strong breath
Blessed is the place where the shining dust of yesterdays settled in sunbeams
Broken is the place where my mind tries to make roses of colored paper
Here is where I reach out to you and sing my little song
Where only I can hear the pulse of pavement beneath my feet
Tomorrow always comes too soon
The spaciousness of sunrises sweating softly into clouds
Peaks sweet as clementine rinds wrought brightly against blue
This is where I wonder, where I reach straight out to you.
When tomorrow comes
I want you to hold your thumb to the moon
Fit the curve of its grey whale back against your seashell nail in an ocean of starry indigo
Did you know, that no matter how bright and belonging the moon may seem
It is never larger in the sky
That your thumbprint's kiss?
I don't suppose to know what that means
But somehow it sings of some soft sadness
That something so striking could whittle down to illusion and nothing more - just a horizon and atmosphere and light and your eyes
Perhaps keep your thumb tucked tight in your fist instead
Perhaps hold a little song in your sorrow
Perhaps to believe is to see
And either way now, darling, what does it matter to you anyways?
And then you are underwater
The feathery opalescent haze
Coiling bony palms around your ankles
Depths and disaster and kisses you never meant to mean goodbye
I hold your aura in my arms
Clutching and begging you to come home
Phantoms of forever rotting in my chest like
Knotted rope and boiling water
How dare you?
How could you?
Who are you?
Come home.
When I let you go
I will pray that your days stretch long into the evening hours to give you that light you love
I will have nothing left to say except that everything everywhere always, is still here
I will whisper I am sorry to you and the one who I so believed you to be
I will tether the joy bubbling in my belly that tells me tomorrow is where I will be free
This is a song
This is Joni Mitchell at midnight
Christmas music in September
Just to make your mind as quiet as those nights around the holiday tree
The little toy train tracks clattering beneath your feet like the pebbles
Slipping from your overflowing hands as you ran to the edge of the pond
To skip the flattest of stones
Towards the fairy house you built of leaves and twigs at the base of the old oak tree.
This is the wisps of steam arising from a cup of hot vanilla milk—taking you back to nights in the rocking chair, freshly bathed, freshly-brushed hair dripping down a nightgown as momma turned pages
Back and forth, back and forth, back and forth.
The way the tired street lamp made the air sparkle when it snowed, made your breathy fog on the window pane glisten
Before your little fingers rubbed it away
Or wrote a secret message
To grandpa, so long gone, and watching you placidly from a nearby frame
Just to say hello.
This is quiet time.
The evenings when the world paused just to listen to the sound daddy’s newspaper made when he turned a page
The padding of sweet brother feet toddling across the wooden floors,
His bubbling laughter when the sticky bottoms of his pajama socks failed and he would slide
And the record player in the corner would echo a velvet put-put-put in response.
This is the space between the antique toolbox and the scalding old-fashioned heater
Where I would crawl and make myself small enough to fold into the sweet spot of a fictitious land
Spilling from the pages of a book thicker than the reverberation of mommy hitting the highest note of Ave Maria
From the kitchen where dinner simmered on the stove
As she quietly muttered about the deal she and daddy made when they married,
To each do half of the cooking, but the turn of her smile nonetheless
When the old wooden porch creaked to the tune of three thumping steps, and Wallace and Gromit keys jingled against a briefcase
Bringing a close to a long day apart.
This is my heart
And how it would ache for as long as I could recall.
The twisting of my stomach and the tears as “I’m sorry,” “I’m sorry,” “I’m sorry,” spilled from my lips
And “For what?” brought no answer--
No reprise, no relief, no remedy.
This is sharp words
And the sourness of your tongue as they crawled out of her lips
The bitter shame of knowing and letting go.
This is a hope to no longer rob air from the old oak trees at the sweet age of 9
Of tissue twisted in palms
Curling myself under the covers my parents tucked me within
Until I felt secure, until my irrationality said it was as exhausted as I,
I was now safe, and it was time for rest.
This is sitting on my desktop, my feet resting upon the chair,
Spinning, drawing fanciful lovelies on paper,
As I listened to his voice
Amen, amen, amen. A poem of sweet hope.
The sigh of the phone line after melancholily winning a game of “You hang up first,”
When he hung up first.
This is the secret that was really a room
A chair, a lamp, a cup of hot vanilla milk
A player piano, the tile in the entryway sweeping bare feet, the softness of Bailey’s sweet fur during thunderstorms,
The weightlessness of water, the hot of the green deck chairs against summered legs,
The little village on the windowsill with the chimney that really worked, the snapping of spearmint gum,
Watching thumbs tapping against a steering wheel from the backseat, tracing Noah’s Ark wallpaper with loving strokes,
Amen, amen, amen.
This is the room that had only one door
That can only be opened in the stillness of the world pausing just to listen to the sound daddy’s newspaper made when it turned a page
In the space between the antique toolbox and the old-fashioned heater
Where I would crawl and make myself small enough to fold into
The fairy house I built of leaves and twigs, like those that crinkled beneath soles at the edge of the pond
Your hands overflowing with pebbles as you ran
Clattering like the little toy train tracks
Around the holiday tree, on nights when your mind was quiet
Where I was now safe, and it was time for rest.
This is amen, amen, amen. A poem of prayers of sweet hope.
When “For what?” brought no answer--
No reprise, no relief, no remedy.
And how it would ache for as long as I could recall.
Until I felt secure, until my irrationality said it was as exhausted as I,
And let Joni Mitchell at 2 am play me home
To the room that had only one door
A window where you could see the tired street lamp make the air sparkle when it snowed, make your breathy fog glisten
Before your little fingers rubbed it away
Or wrote a secret message
And when the record player in the corner at quiet time
Would echo a velvet put-put-put in response
Just to say hello.
Everything is forever,
if just a little piece.
01
Palm my pieces
Feel each fragment, one-by-one
See how somehow
They still catch light
02
Crocheting wildflower chains
I sat with you and wondered
If I tied enough beautiful things together
Could they become whole?
03
Roots still sunk deep in soil
Wandering through the earth
Searching for sunny sweetness
A place to grow again
04
Geodes are simply stones
Waiting to be split in two pieces to shine
Perhaps that is what happened
The night you walked away
05
Something to remember a time
Before edges and borders and seams
Like when we stepped out of the forest
Whole,
And everything was in-between.
You saw so much stitched
Between red and white stripes
But when you read between those lines
I sometimes wonder,
Did the field of stars burn so brightly
You were left blinded by hope?
All of these words her weary mind parts with, I will catch on my tongue to make poetry in their leaving.
You do not have to untangle
Your strength is knotted
Best appreciated in the fullness of complexity
Your patchwork of in-betweens
May be a gray area
But that is never to say
You are without color.
I write to finish the story you started here.
And we laugh
There on the dock
Feet beside paws
Wet on rough wood
Your cheeks flush with sunshine
Light lilting on white-kissed waters
Beyond bent oak arms
And we speak with fingers entwined
Vines budding evermore bound
Daydreams blush
Against yesterdays
We solemnly promise to heal as a whole
Pinkies lacing through golden honey hours
Around each kitchen waltz
And we walk wet leaves
Mud, earth, sand, sky, seashells scattering
This whispering trail
Seems a lily-laced aisle
You yesterday
Where these soles first met soil, while tomorrow
Unwinds the tight-rope horizon, such a beautiful bride
And we trace time in wonder,
For today, always, is the sweetest day.