Earthshine

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 so much holiness 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 i80, 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 on the moon. 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.

Sick

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.

Science and Its Secrets

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?

Little

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.

Show & Tell

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?

Little Things Like Love

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.

Everything I Never Said

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.

Nectar

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.

Wayfarer

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.

Make Me

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.

Where Everything Begins

They call you an idea to make me fall out of love with you.

The Finding

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.

Catalpa

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.

Pen, Parchment, and a Spoonful of Syrup

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 Don't Know What Dark Is

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.

Do You Trust Me?

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.

Regenerate

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.”

All The Lessons I've Learned

Sometimes you have to spit on silver to make it shine.

I Can Handle Myself

"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.

3 a.m.

You made my favorite songs all taste like you.