I stir the soup on the stove for my mother as she punches the highest keys of the piano, matching their pitch. The light here is gold and wimpled as a river trout. It's alive and pirouettes a warm caress down the old wood banister, almost as if the fireplace with the broken chimney could really burn. My father lies on the bare hardwood floor and draws things that do not yet exist. His markers screech against the drafting paper, reeking familiar acrid ink. I wonder what colors smell like. I wonder what it's like to build a home. That autumn, I craft one under an oak tree for the fairies in the woods that I don't really believe in but still hope are real. I do it just in case. I keep my dreams warm.
Her daddy says, "Honey, hold my hand, we're in a parking lot."
I drive home thinking about all the little ways we say, "I love you.”
Our hearts are so much holier than our tongues
Their truth is a simple, open-ended offering:
How will you keep the light?
I sit with the windows open and listen
I listen to the world starting its day
There is honey in the hum of morning
The people off to live their lives, but not yet,
First a few more sips of coffee, the drone of public radio, the carbonated chaos of the highway
First, a moment just to praise beginning.
Maybe I'll make it morse code -
The periods I put at the end of my sentences that nearly pierce the page, and the lines of worry you surely still wear across your brow.
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 that it stings.
Ochre dust stains the floor where I unsling my pack. The earth is older here and it follows me home. It lies in drifts beside boots and dreams of where I belong. The floorboards creak a welcome beneath my weathered feet. They ask me if I found myself out there this time. I unstick my shirt from my sweat and my skin. I step into the bath and shiver.
Ask me tomorrow.
I watch where the sun breathes its blaze on the ragged necks of mountains. Crawl my eyes over each peak and imagine what I could see from there. I always wished that I was taller. I hoped a second growth spurt would hit me at 16. It never did but I learned that you can always climb a little higher than your head to find your heart. I make a mug full of peppermint tea and wash the counter where I spill. The rising steam smells a little like yesterday. I remember for a moment what it felt like when forever was real. I turn off the lamplight and watch the sun slip into something softer, and somehow maybe still, more beautiful.
They call you an idea to make me fall out of love with 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
We’ll wait here 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
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 this canyon’s cliffs.
Your dark knows nothing of the distance between two mountains, darling.
Let alone what you broke when you left.
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.
I’ve got four years left until you've never touched this body. I’ll hold my newborn heart in my hands and whisper, “I told you so, darling.”
Sometimes you have to spit on silver to make it shine.
"You'll get eaten alive out there"
Your first words dripped their oily condescension down my throat
From the first moment you tried to make me less,
Your slick vanity grasping hard at a heart you weren't ever enough to hold
So, you know what you did, and,
You have to admit, it's a bit funny, isn't it?
How you are the small one.
And,
I bet it eats you alive.
You made my favorite songs all taste like you.
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.