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Things I Need You to Know
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.
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.
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.
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
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
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?
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.
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.
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?
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.
My heart is a martyr.
It craves nothing more than to give its entire being over to a love bigger than itself.
Will you still love me when I’m gone
When I come home and fold back in
I will love you soft and steady
Rain on a summered tin roof
The lace of the wildflowers beading brightly
While the warm body of water breathes it back to the sky
Will you still love me when I’m tired
When I can hardly raise my shaking heart to meet yours
I will love you courageously
Be a sparkling dawn in your nighttime
The breath of warmth from the fireside
Mirroring the mountainous strength you already hold
Will you still love me when I’m here
When joy pulses through the air like holy hands and praise
I will love you with arms outstretched
Running into you like a high speed collision of stars
The snowy air holding us soft in its galaxies
I’ll be your gravity, your orbit, and the silken sweet years
It takes light to come home.
I want mismatched socks under plaid sheets
Tip-toed bare feet on hardwood dancing
Morning eyes and undone hair
Call me your home and you’ll be mine
Where crescent moon breath
Dries lilac on the windowsill
Shape our hearts into nesting dolls
Tuck them away in velvet pitter patter
If you think you know
I’ll pour certainty into your palms
Settle stardust in these window panes
Their tired bones will bloom
Recycle my silence
Into the pauses you always forget to take
I’ll fill your fractures
With late afternoon honey
Let the good light lead you here
Some sun would do you good
Let the ladders down
Together we can climb the clouds
Your sentences aren’t mine to finish, still
Morning dapples on your river where I rise
It’s stained glass in my sanctuary
Holy light and honey, she runs home from here
I empty coffee cans of faded flowers
Send them back to soil of a ground that only grows
The wildflowers will wrestle the woods to find me
No matter how many trees I climb to hide
Autumn breathes in the barnwood swing
Swims in your lungs back and forth like a lullaby
A slow sway in silence sailed from the sky
I sat my secrets in the weeds and asked them how to pray
Always answering in tangles of blushing blooms
Soft stars and seeds of someday soon
Find me forgetting and fragile
Touching toes with something slow and sacred
Pretty pieces clayed from pinecones and promises,
I’ll show you mine if you show me yours.
Read me these mountains
Broken braille heights
Spoken in screams and shivers
My landscape is your dancer
Mars and moves till a horizon
Pulls to plateau here
Leave me unwound, chasmic and close
Wrought from soil seeded with stars, and
This chaotic
This tectonic
This unrelentingly platonic,
Fear of falling.
- The land must love you too.
Unbutton time to her body of light,
Can you hear me now?
I want to be tethered to something as big as your faraway felicitous fire
To taste what the milky way has written there on Orion's heart
Those words tell you how to pull the stars down, I hear
I'll cup them gently in hands soft as the willow whispers breathing between my secrets
Cradle them in the space only found wholly between our beating chests
Exhale a breath that is aria and begin to hum our harmonies
Soft, choose a light to warm your way
Fold clay in these prayer palms while the oneness reminds you, you are.
Sweet darling, you aren't star dust...
You are alight and you shine.
1. The power of music listened to on trains — that Fjögur Píanó, an old man with his paper, and the outbound red line can bring me to tears.
2. My love affair with Pride and Prejudice. That I have been reading it since I was nine years old, and have never allowed myself to reach the last page.
3. That I go for walks with nowhere to be.
4. Especially when it’s pouring.
5. That I need you not to question that I am a vegetarian in leather calf-high boots.
6. In fact, sometimes I just need you not to question.
7. That I need you to go exploring with me through eclectic towns in Vermont.
8. That chardonnay goes best with popcorn.
9. But my affinity for pale ale is uncontested.
10. That I love to wear my rain boots even though my toes get cold, just because I love the sound they make on the cobblestones.
11. That my favorite flower changes every day.
12. That I’d love for you to garden with me–to plant a thousand flowers in soil so rich that I’d never have to choose just one bouquet.
13. That I need you to wander the farmers’ market with me, just to see who can find the sweetest strawberry first.
14. That I was Wendy Davis for Halloween, even though you don’t know who she is.
15. That coconut gives me a stomachache but I eat it anyways.
16. To know the first snowflakes of the season are like stars fallen.
17. That if you catch them in your mouth, you can taste your wishes.
18. That I recycle.
19. That I will always eat your Ben and Jerry’s out of the tub no matter how many flavors you buy to deter me.
20. That I won’t throw away my Birkenstocks until the soles have run clean through, no matter how dirty they get.
21. That I raised monarch butterflies as a child and named them all French Fry because the first time one hatched I was midway through a Happy Meal.
22. That I find Jess from New Girl far too relatable.
23. That I used to spend hours chasing the keys of a player piano before my fingers learned the notes.
24. That I’m still chasing those notes.
25. That I’d love to have a golden retriever one day.
26. That I believe in a God, but don’t know much else.
27. That I read a sign on the bus that said to “walk with purpose at night.”
28. So I wondered what my purpose was all night.
29. To know that the L.L. Bean catalog men have a George Clooney effect on me.
30. That I’ll wear your flannels to sleep.
31. That red lipstick makes me feel sexy.
32. But I laugh too much so it usually winds up on my teeth.
33. That I’m twenty and have laugh lines that I love.
34. That when I was little I used to build houses for fairies in my backyard.
35. That you will not be allowed to make the coffee until several lessons have been held.
36. That I like to be alone sometimes.
37. That I will sometimes read trashy magazines, but only after I’ve read Time Magazine and The New York Times cover-to-cover.
38. That I’m afraid of the dentist.
39. So I keep my teeth in tip-top shape.
40. That I hoard office supplies.
42. That I wear bifocals when no one is around.
43. That I like to think I can make a mean peanut butter cookie.
44. That I’m always a little bit chilly.
45. So I’ll always sleep with socks on.
46. That I love Ikea furniture.
47. And I’ll ask you to please help put it together when we get home.
48. That I knew where my parents hid the Christmas presents, but I never peeked.
49. That the thought of “you” makes me want to run barefoot through rainstorms,
as if somehow the clouds might contain the condensation of your city,
as if I could dance in the dewdrops evaporated from your sweating glass on a windowsill, wherever you are.
50. That at night I imagine I can count the street lamps from you, to me.
51. That I want to pluck them from the ground, one by one, like wildflowers, until I have a shimmering bouquet of softly petaled light.
52. That I want to hand them to you, become captured in the infinity of your irises, and say,
53. “I’m here now, love. It’s nice to meet you.”
I’ve been driving too much for my own good lately.
I can't decide if its healthy to take the truth home.
That’s where they say the heart is,
wherever I’m with you.
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
