When we all make it home, I hope the field where we meet is a wild one. The best places always are. And the best people.
Like so much else, the fireplace there was strictly for show
My favorite fairytale began when I filled its chest with candles and set that room aglow
On nights before the gritty groan of snowplows sang us to sleep, the wind would sometimes sneak through stone and set my skin prickling
I'd watch a dozen little deaths become whispering wraiths, then strike another match
Poems have always come to me wholeheartedly.
I hear them again when you are around — in my head or in my hands.
Your love writes me letters from every beautiful being that has ever been.
Sometimes I wonder if, when it’s slow and still and the whiskey is warming and you feel that gentle draw in your chest, you ever read those words I wrote for you again.
By which of course, I mean, I wonder if you ever pull my soul out of your torn back pocket where it belongs, just to tell it that,
Yes, you remember, too.
I like a good story's start, don't get me wrong.
But my favorite beginning always comes at the end. I love the buzzing white noise of happily-ever-afters that follow like a blank sheet of paper, so full of empty importance. I throw my soul into conjuring the most breathtakingly, achingly beautiful scenarios that could ever possibly follow and to forever choose to believe that somewhere - in some galaxy, some song, some time, something, some way I cannot understand - they are real.
It's not that different from believing in God, I suppose.
We all want to believe that a beginning comes at the close. That our hearts are more stardust than science and are eternal in a way we can only really feel in our bones. Ask me for proof and I'll plant you gardens until you're ready to see magic bloom. I'll pull pages from my favorite anthologies, fold them into proper paper airplanes and fly little holy letters in your direction until you feel the collective weight of every breath that has ever been entirely exhaled at the last lines of, "To Begin With, The Sweet Grass."
Can you feel that heaviness in your hands? Are you strong enough to lift it to eye-level and tell it you love it to its center, though you don't know who or what it is or why?
It's not that different from falling in love, I suppose.
Maybe we were born to believe.
My choir robe was blue as the ripe summer berries we baked into our bread
The polyester carpet was as gray as my worst fears of the future
I'd grind the heels of my plastic sandals into its sorry skin and train my eyes ahead on that single stained glass star
A fitting pinnacle for that room that promised perfect at a price
My voice would fly fish across the shallows of sacrament
The chaos, the chorus, the casting — again and again beating towards that curiously lonely light
I pulled my heart from my throat, such a soft sacrificial lamb
Drew eyelashes off the cheeks of every hurt that ever called someday their reason to stay
I let the pews punish my joy with fingers pointing skyward and pressed to their lips
Make this wishing breath count, but make it quiet
Speaking secrets aloud only spooks what you seek
I reel my rod in empty and begin to hum the hymn instead
Our souls are separate from our stories.
Our hearts are never quite as sequential, as chapped, as chaptered, as stowed safe and silent in those peppery worn pages — entrusted with holding our growing truths.
We are nesting dolls.
Each version I’ve ever called by name sits soft inside the next. When an innermost part has something to share that needs to be heard, I must pry open my multitudes, layer by painful layer — until I can echo the achingly unanswered wails of that rosy-cheeked babe, fold her in my palms, and pray.
Unlike the other conversations I so often share — with the steam off my morning coffee, or the hawks over the highway, or some other solitary specter of God — the words that I whisper her way are no tender gauze of gardens to come.
Instead, I share my sorries and strength and safety, my voice dripping sticky nectars of salted buttercream and maple blood in the tapping tin and beeswax kissed by wild clover honey. I breathe out balms to soothe the tender bruises gone by. I gently deliver their promise to the divine inside her, from the divine inside me, which is really the same as her own, inside us, inside you —
Which is only really to say, I speak aloud the light she needed to know.
The Book of Love is singing on my stereo tonight so I stop a block from home
There is irony in the warm windows watching me pry my grip off these words
You know, the ones?
Those honest stones in your stomach that ache in technicolor
The last sipped breaths of that Frankenstein future
All you once wanted, written to life in daisy-yellow desperation
The people and the places I have called home are sticky-fingered, sad-faced babes
I whisper them a lullaby I also need to hear:
Living with love is the heartbreak none of us are meant to survive
What if in the end, the most wholehearted people are those whose hearts have been the most wholly given away?
I want to leave this world so shattered that nothing can stop the light streaming in.
This morning the Wasatch sunrise slathered orange marmalade across my cheek
The dogs sighed on the window-warmed oak floors while my first sip of coffee stitched the start of another day
This morning I said “thank you”
To the postman waving from my letterbox by the door and to the first frost of the year blooming across the glass between us
Joy rose to meet my attention, ripe and worthy and wild
Her answers always come as questions, so I held out my open hand
“What if what you're missing, is all you already have?”
My memories are fingerprints on rose-colored glass. Everything I see shines from this side.
I want to write something ugly
Tell you about how my backpack has more scars than me and I don't overpack anymore
Let you know about all the little Gods I've met in the magic-flooded mundane…
The ragged dying dog in the homeless camp who lapped gravy off my frozen fingers till they stung
How I held her bony body in my jacket and begged the teeth of tomorrow to be kind
That hundred-year-old home I had and that one time it rained so hard it blew the stairwell ceiling straight in and we called it a skylight
I saw a sticky sunrise from my hall the next day and thought, this is how all storms should end—with your boots caked in plaster and a little bit of light.
Longing has leaned ladders on my brow lately. Being beneath them bodes bad luck, but it sure can be hard to get out of my head.
How could you want an aisle seat, even with those long legs?
A mile-and-a-half below my wide-eyed rapture and aching ears, the tonic morning rush hour is a glittering vein feeding the heart of a fool's gold city I never really knew. Sticky pines stitch together the tobacco fields with their drafty drying barns. If you lean in, you can still hear yesterdays echo their ache through the wood rot rafters and long-abandoned briar nests: dawn's humid dove songs and the spiced young summers when laugh lines left after the punchline and I wasn't afraid of wasting film in my papa's tired Nikon. The land's presser-foot patchwork leaves the page with brushed acrylic edges, and that is when I see the sea - that big blank blue that could break any one idea of infinity.
But, no... of course, you are correct. Enjoy your magazine and ginger ale, I suppose?
I thought love was fireworks until I met you and the sun rose.
I stop taking Prozac and remember how to cry.
The vet says my dog is 97 in human years. Yesterday, he made an angel in the first snowfall he ever saw.
An elderly widow has dementia. Her first poem is soft but sturdy. It's the velvet dust on butterfly wings and delicate as dried dandelions. I wonder if it will make her fly.
The Rockefeller Christmas tree this year is a Norway Spruce from Massachusetts. It was planted by newlyweds in 1967, and gifted in loving memory of a sweetheart’s passing. Above the city fanfare, I love to think about those tired, twining roots still sleeping in that quiet Berkshire yard. Their rest is blessed beneath bare feet; waiting and willingly wilting for the soil that calls them home.
In the winter when the skies get too warm above the Salt Lake Valley, its belly fills with smog. My lungs are already tired today from a disease that didn’t exist five years ago. I cough into my coat sleeve as I step outside to a porch steeped in a blaze of setting sunlight. There’s weight in my marvel as I watch our weary world give and give and give her all, while all we do is take.
Someone that I love tells me that during their first panic attack, they believed that they were dying in-between heartbeats. A Snapple cap declares a hummingbird's heart beats 1,200 times per minute. On my grandma's window sill, I saw them sing, saw them flit, saw them sip nectar with their long tunneled tongues. I think of all the little lives those hummingbirds would have in a single day, were that terror true. What lucky creatures to be born so beautiful - again, and again, and again.
I served food to people in a park. A man doing pushups under a tree wants to say a prayer with me before he eats. He asks God to bless the water in our toes. I see the snowcapped mountains shivering to the east and know he's asking not to freeze. My bible is in my mother's attic, but everything holy is here. I squeeze his hand hard and I whisper amen.
In Nebraska, there is a waxing crescent moon tonight. In the spaces between street lamps on the I-80, you can see the far side of the moon is lightly illuminated. The internet says that is the result of "earthshine." We are 50 times brighter in the moon's sky than the moon is in ours. On particularly cloudy evenings in our hemisphere, we shine all the brighter to what orbits. I think about how we don't always see ourselves the way that others see us. I think about how we can use our clouds to make light.
I warm medicine between my palms and remember when you said this all was make-believe
I stick the needle in my skin and wait to feel better.
Dung beetles use the glow of the milky way galaxy to navigate. The first time I saw stars that bright I cried harder than the day I decided magic wasn't real. It was all too delicious discovering I was wrong. Aren't we all just crawling on our hands and knees in the dark towards an unknowable light?
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.