Evidence

I have been certain before

Of only a few solitary things

That the choice to believe is brave

And calloused hands are her favorite warriors

That discomfort is a gateway to guidance

Lean over its lip and you can touch your truths scattered scarlet in the sand

That bathing in the autumn blaze of birch groves

Will wash the world till all that remains is your soul - standing strong, sacred, and blessedly unbroken

I have known how to hope and hold what’s heavy and heal

But I have never before known you.

Write In My Margins

This library lies somewhere in the spaces between pretty paper pages and the holiest heart of the woods where they grew.

Sweet Pea

All I want is to be the ladder you grow on.

The Cloth We’re From

My heart has a seam-ripper I’m longing to lose.

Wings

Whenever I worry what might come next

I take my heart for a walk in these woods

The order here unfolds without conjectured concern or questions of being

Relentless rhythms born only of trust in tomorrow’s transience

There is a voice in my chest that, too, knows such truths

She speaks her spells aloud in song, their melodies washed in the still-water silence of starlight

I can’t say if another sun will rise, or what those hours may hold, but,

With unwavering wonder at what light has already found me this day,

I will do all I can to grow, all according to purpose; not plan.

Light Our Way Home

I’ll meet you in the dark tonight

Patiently pour over the shelves of my sanctuary, all honey-kissed parchment and gathered earth

Which treasure might best guide your way through these saturnine shadows?

With reverence resounding, my fingers will come to cradle what I could not sooner give

I remember you, I’ll say with a smile to its sentient shine

Are you ready to rise?

Auroral and alabaster as an everlasting ember

I’ll let that light loose to your sight

Do you know what I know now?

The Gardener

My neighbor planted flowers by his mailbox until the day his heart stopped. In August, his widow hands my father a pair of shearling snow boots, size 10.

They sit on the back porch, patiently baking in the sun of a couple seasons too soon. My dog wonders who they belong to. I tell her he’s somebody someplace waiting on winter.

Wherever he’s gone, I'd bet my last dollar it smells like daffodils.

Body Double

Every 7 years they say your cellular composition will be entirely renewed

I have 1356 days left until you've never touched my skin

But this heart?

This heart was never yours.

Hold On

When the day comes where I find you,

I’ll lead you to the back porch where we can sigh with the stars.

I’ll dip my fingers in their milky haze until the galaxies cling to my fingers with unrelenting attachment - art class glitter and glue.

I’ll unfold our clenched palms like the tattered, dog-eared, so-loved collection of glovebox atlases that they are.

I’ll hold my sparkling skin against yours to repair a rift and light our way -

Until we both know the road home by heart.

Rising

Summertime sifts its reedy songs - sure, sweet, and certain - untangling light lost in morning meadows, all viridescence and tang

Blush brushstrokes bloom from skies, soft and sparkling as spun sugar

Citrus staccatos glitter their gold, bright as the moment I first found that the doorway dust moat becomes a miracle in just the right light

I watch the daybreak percolate promise through pleading pine boughs’ sapphire veins

Their rich bark bases are oars, steering strong across the stillness of inky violet velvet seas

See how the surface ripples where, shaking and slippered, fawns first find their feet

Holy is this haven, folded like line-dried linens sewn through with love, as fearless as forever, here in the dark before dawn.

Quotidian Quandary

Take me to where warm windows glowing golden on summer-soft nighttime drives

Are a wild and rooted bouquet of humanity's heart in its becoming

Little freckled, exquisitely ordinary, peculiar and petalled vignettes

Orbiting hungrily around some central beating body, or, perhaps stronger still,

That hardwood, foundational, yet inescapably ephemeral belief

In something better, and beautiful, and blindingly bright.

Home

There is a home on a hill

Honey sunlight warms mahogany bones

The floorboards there are moons

Wax and wane with warmth and wind

Windows cast starlight in the daytime

Their panes coupling under weight of years

Open doors by toppled boots

Hold willow golden shadow-shine

Muddied paws and aching feet

Voyage home woodland memories

Come lie with me in empty rooms

We’ll fill them up with baited breath

Buckle Up, Baby

Go ahead and imply - I’ll confirm, coy and confident

There is no "if” here, love

The only time that I hung that word in my heart for you, I wondered,

What might be lost if we don't leap?

I fell and I found this,

Pretty-pressed in the pages of woodland walks and eyes that swallow me whole

Sun-kissed constellations at the nape of your neck and kisses that constantly curl at the corners

Promises felt like patches till today

We can build our home here - safe and strong and sacred

Tether today to tomorrow with a daisy chain

Hang that wreath on the door so the whole world knows

Whichever way you want to wander,

You can plan on me.

Midnight Magic Tricks

It's late and I love you

So I scribble something sweet on a grocery list between the brie and some thyme

You're waking pieces of me I long thought were dead

I hand them flowers by the fieldful and ask them to dance

Planting My Promises

I've been wanting to ask if you’re real yet

My poem-patched knees patiently prayed but roots never grew

Now I'm ankle deep in melted metal asking fading fire to give me gold

The bells all broke by sundown, but I hear fiddles strike the silent night

I bought a little blue book in Brooklyn

I'll take you there someday when we're finished with forests

My palms will plant cursive paper prisms in the soil

Their sweet solemn seeds will say an amen again

Hand me that pen, would you?

A Love Like This

I love you like a river waiting

Patiently for Springtime to blossom

When the mountains and your sugared snow

Will melt in the rolling golden sunshine

Where mossy and glittering

A babbling brightness will trickle

Down roiling cliff-sides and cascades

To fill my belly with butterflied rapids

Till together we will spill over

Blushing banks and rush on

To be safe in the soft spray of seas

Until finally found and brought home

Suspended and sparkling in light soft as honey

Held slow in silken silence and sky

Do you think that our love is like water, perhaps?

Do you think that when it's over, maybe we could do it all again?

Become the pattern of a poem

Pressing on amongst woodland stars and soil?

I'd like to think so

I would like to take your hand here

Step into something so big and sweet

So strong and unending

As entropic as an eternity

Sailed forward by nothing but a sparkle of light

And the fluttering pulse of a promise.

Memento Mori

I wrote the vows you’ll never hear on the nape of your neck

Your eyes always were in the back of your head

- Don't do this to her, too.

Falling Forward

Your forest feels familiar, friend

I can’t claim to know the way to walk, but I feel forevers echo in each footfall that follows

I’ve been here before, been yours before

I’ve known these woods, those words, this wonder - all by heart

The sparkling seasons sway and swoon in shades of glittering gold and rusted rouge

Painted bright as the sunlight they spent summer soaking in

Leaves lazily loft from aspen arms like petals fallen from the forsythia blazing behind the barn

Love me now or love me not, darling, it wouldn’t change a thing

I took you to my hiding place to show you what I’d found

The odds and ends of french braid afternoons sat surefire in silence to see me swing

Back and forth to the tune of some lost little lullaby

I think you must have been there even then, but you are so much brighter than I remember, baby

I’ll wear that light in my ribcage until my bones are reborn roots

If I am blessed enough to be born again with branches, I’d like for someone to hang a rope swing from my strongest spot

Somewhere soft where she can sit and swim in someday

Until that day arrives

Until home is your heartbeat beneath my cheek

Until I take you to my hiding place, to show you what I’ve found

Fold me in forevers while the world forgets my face

The soil will steal all but our souls once we’ve learned why we were here

And oh sweet sir,

Someday we’ll say we were -

We were here.

Guarded

There are answers in your eyes glittering bright as hidden treasure in its trove

Your wicked cheekiness brandishes itself in sideways smiles and stolen kisses

You are polite, and so you ask

My own questions rise rapid in reply, ready and ripe with alleged expectation

They meet yours at the centerline of no man's land where they stubbornly stand and stay

"Nothing" leaves my lips, the very sound of it dripping pearls and rubies and desert rose quartz.

- What?

Lucky Number 7

Go find your favorite little Vermont mountain town. Greet her like the old friend that she is - with coffee sips, love, and laughing eyes. Walk in the woods beneath fire-flooded maples and sparkling birch boughs. Climb a mountain and whisper "amen" at least once per step. Haunt the hallowed halls of a creaky bookshop in search of the stories that need to be heard. Sift through stacks of records on a sunlit flea market corner because putters and crackles should always be part of a song. Drive through the clouds and ask them what it's like to fall with faith. Hold happiness in your heart like a firefly on your upturned hand. Give it thanks for its light, then send it skyward.