Acres

One day there will always be mornings with you

Light and laughter and warmth and sun pressing on through the curtains

Your sleepy sideways smile as you fold me in

Fingers entwined and the whisper of lips on my forehead

I want to wake with you

In every sense of the phrase

Fluttering eyelashes and firefly hearts

The light of our love illuminating galaxies we've never seen

Let's stay up too late and wake up too early

The clink of your toothbrush in the glass beside mine

Bare feet on cold tile and coffee in cups passed from my hands to yours

Kisses and laughter and love you for always

Never Let It Fade Away

Your skyline might look like the stars ignited

In the heat of a million beating hearts racing the dark

Becoming a brightness broken by buildings so tall they disappear

Your skyline might look like star shine on red rocks

So bright that when you stand before dawn and God with a camp mug in your hands,

The Milky Way can practically cream your coffee

I’m certain I don’t know

But I believe in imagination,

and sometimes believing is seeing.

Abilene

This brook mirrors heaven and it knows how to sing

The stones we skip birth a tip-toed web of constellations

Light as lips breathing secrets on autumn air

Dancing and dizzy till the weight of wonder swallows them whole

Moonlight spills soft and heavy on the precociousness of these promises

Sweet as warm milk and honey

Poured from a polished porcelain pitcher

With a nick in its neck and those painted petals

Love me now and love me knots

My garden blooms for bare feet alone

In the cradling arms of mystic meadows and missteps

I wish I couldn’t see through you

The greedy little hands of water reach like lovely longing

Beguile each beam till they tangle together

Igniting a druzy drizzle of refracted light

Brighter than stars, this moment will be

As you were and as you are

Close your book on my questions

Till they are pretty-pressed and sweet forever

Light as lips breathing secrets in buttercup breaths

When your yesterdays fall from the pages,

Remember me in kaleidoscope color

Like moonbeams on the babble of brook stones

Like petals pinwheeling to our feet

Like perfect painted porcelain pieces

Like always was a place we were.

The Wavelength of a Heartbeat

Blooming like the blush of early skies

I sat cross-legged in the meadow we made

Bare feet and that old floral dress

I strung a necklace from the beads of dew

I painted my cheeks the sweet rose of skies

Played make believe that you were there

Poured a cup of tea in chipped china

Sipped slowly while daytime sunk soft behind the gloried green hills

In the sheer golden nonsense

Of falling suns and rising stars

Of beating hearts

Born from the fiery dust

Of that very same light,

I see you.

Saltwater Pearls

I wish I hadn’t, but I’m glad that I did -

I couldn’t trust your truths.

If it matters to matter,

Your grain of sand is always a jewel to me.

Jailor

I still send secrets through your ribcage

Prison my pieces with your heart

You safeguard my sense where you left me

Empty-handed by the water, tangled madly in gray.

Weatherman

I wish that I could remember those sunrises without you.

The sandy grit of shattered shells imprinting on my thighs, leaving puckered empty hollows, begging my body to remember the slow violence of their brokenness.

The blood orange sun flowing forth from indigo seas like a baby’s crowning head.

Some painful birth, or a canvas flowering beneath a brush plucked from a box of paints, and I wonder if there is even a difference.

The coffee is cold by the time you pull yourself out.

Enough time for me to fall soundly asleep to the hush-a-bye curling songs of water and shores.

If you wait long enough, warmth will fade from just about anything.

But as lucky as a greening copper penny gummed to the sidewalk,

Light always seems to find tomorrow.

Timeline

We let the wildflowers grow

Lace in soft mountain air

Sipping wine on the wooden swing

You leapt and laughed

Brassy brightness in old oak arms

Clinging to the creaking cicada songs

Auspicious and alight

Do you remember what happened next?

Thick Skin

Palming and praying

Over bodies of broken bark

Perfect in growth and fractures

You were not so far away.

God

Light freckling in branches and breezes

Do you know how to pray?

This is how I say amen -

One foot in front of the other.

I'll Keep Me Warm

Steadily straying towards

Divergent threads parsing snowy pines

I saw the hearth

I saw the peak

I chose to climb

Coloring

That’s what I love most about art. There is truth with no answers. It’s all in the seeking.

Spoonfuls of Sugar

Where silence excavates each exhalation

I touch these canyon walls

Breathe in the echoes and earth

Speak aloud the goodbye I've already said

Strength was something I had earned

In carefully measured doses

Medicine for a maker

Warming my insides until sundown arrived

I Hope You Find It

I wasn't still because I couldn't keep up

I was only still learning why you spend your whole life running away

When you never turned around

I matched your pace cross the compass rose and ran

Your mirror is already breaking babe,

and your love's light is just the same -

A halfhearted reflection from a waning crescent moon,

When I deserve the sun.

- Your pace isn't peace and neither is she.

Hardwood Lessons

Tomorrow is the first place I fell.

Hand me storied stitches in tangles of yesterdays

Brittle frays with bitten ends

Arrange this graveyard in families of forevers

Nothing but names to remember us by

The laughter isn't lost on me

In these silken seams that shouldn't be

Unhinge infallible from its rust-ransomed frame

Easy come and easier go

Faith was a slip knot tied round my waist

The farther I felt, the tighter the twist

Weave wild and wonder at the monsters I made

As you split me to shattered, I sang

The littlest lullaby I could remember

Between the scorch-earth sting

Of your ignition triggers and my thundering resolve

Grasp my gasp in a white knuckled fist

Today the floor I hit taught me to stand.

Counting

Abacus rings on the maples

Wishing years would just unwind

Sweet world and sun tea

Growing one in kind

Handshake

I don't know who you are but you feel familiar

I would like to memorize each movement

Fold them into hazy happy days

Let them grow wild and slow in my palms with each melded moment

I don't know who you are but the space between us is lined with light

There is something here beaconing my footfalls forward

Coax me in and draw me close,

I want to fathom this flutter could be more than I've felt

It's nice to meet you.

Shaper

The middle of nowhere is the center of joy

Climb the stairs on an honest day

Reach the roof and sit to stare

For just a little while, for just us two

The junipers and sagebrush mill about

Their soft sounds weaving canopies

Around the twinkle of crickets and birdsong

The sharp smell of soil, a circle of arms

Your warmth and these sunbeams soaking into my skin

Kiss the places I forgot to love today

The wild meadows and the whispering mountains

Draw each drop of caution clean from my blood

Simmering summer sunsets

Radiant and reckless

I’ll find myself here, lost in your gaze

You draw me in outside of the lines

I’ll find a flower from each field of forever

Softly sew their sweet stems

The petals of each pasture are butterfly wings

Far more fearless than fragile.

Gold

Take me to your hiding place

Where warm honey softly turns in trees

We are a golden grove of autumn aspen

Our braided roots some ancient arterial atlas

Trace these tributaries till you touch

Where sun spills sweet over me

The forests we have shouldered

Will alight in a daze of ardent reverie

Becoming

When I hand you the light in my eyes

Will you hear each word I have whispered to yours?

Touch the gravity of always and old oak arms and dizzy tiger lily prayers

Here, we know this one by heart.