I want to ask you to tell me a story
Tell me about the time we spent the twilight chasing dreams under the old oak tree
Till we fell into the grass, our laughter singing symphonies with evening melody
Hold my hand and tell me
You’ll still love me, when my arthritic fingers
are bent with age
Open your world to me
Let me step in quietly
On toes soft as the first steps of the night’s last waltz
Dance with me,
And when the song ends,
We’ll teach our hearts
To hum.
Joni Mitchell at 2 am
Held your soul like a church bell hymn
If that’s not grace, I don’t know what is
You’re bright red blood on these chapped lips
Closet walls still bear the scars
Of making wishes in the dark
Charcoal drawings you stole from me
Home got lost in memory
When I was a child I would sing to you
I'd climb up to the wooden rope swing in the old oak tree sheltering the tiger lily meadow
My hymns and summered legs keeping time to your beating heart
Acorn, lavender, and molasses moonshine
Confetti down from the branches you cradle
Summered soles on warm tar
You can be daytime tomorrow
Let me hold you while they sleep.
Shush the tiptoe second hand on your watch
For the way my heart beats on the off-beat
On the off-chance that these holes, all along
Were the seams of your stars
Wash my bones
Till they’re cleaner than my conscience
These lungs on loan
From the day my dust was light
Call my bluff
Tell me home is where the heart is
You’ve had enough
But your soles keep touching ground
When the dust of my bones
Is folded gently into soil
Turned with water
Bled from swollen clouds
Breath broken and chilled
Inhaled by roots of rivers and willows
I hope my heart won’t shatter
When you hear the noise
The rain makes as it whistles
Shushing hollow homes
Tasting ripe apologies
I’m sorry
The sour insincerity
Quietly anchored
In shaky hands that just won’t still
Ever and always a sullen reminder
These knotted storms with beating chests
Can’t sing.
I remember skipping stones
Touching notes I’d never heard
I remember stepping stones
Pebbles between my toes
I left a daisy crown on your bed
Wine drunk and half asleep
The dust of days
Wrapped in palmed pages
Read them when you're alone.
Little sparrow with your broken wings
Why do you always look so sad?
Build me up and break me down
All that shattered was my trust
Don't worry, sweet morning bird
Fractures heal
And you can sing.
Daisy dreams in the wide palmed plains
Bright-eyed lullabies
Drenched in some orphaned sun
Find me waiting for you
Holding my heart across my chest
Beating
Beating
When you try to count ravens
But forget how many mean life, luck, or loss
Sunlight splinters draw lines on their land
Fragments full of the only solitude you've ever held hope in
Still I believe.
As the headlights first dawn across your cheek bones
Scalding sun on a reaching horizon
You'll understand stillness is a question
From somewhere behind yourself you'll watch your body become someplace able to be broken
Spiderwebs will bloom through glass, meandering tributaries unwinding to some sea you don't know your toes will ever touch
That single breath suspended
In the sacred space between open lips and clenched fists
Fragility and the tabernacle you’ve held it within
Will ignite in place of the sound your lungs hoped to make
Little white sighs of expectation etching their songs into silence
As the trembling begins to crawl into your coiled bones
You’ll touch places you thought you’d never mistake
Some sweet dust of faith brightly blurring words left unsaid
The gentleness of unfelt cacophony
And the carillon of ringing in your ears
Bells never sounded so sweet.
I want to buy you a cup of coffee on your best and worst days, write you notes and leave them scattered around your house, show up on your porch in the pouring rain with my ukulele just to say hello, send you postcards brimming with adventures and run away with you for weekends with no maps. I want to love you in a litany of little things.
I love mornings best, I think. I love the coffee sips and the precocious weight of an empty day.
I think I’ve been afraid to write
Because if I opened the door the tiniest shutter
This heartache might just spill out in a kaleidoscope of paper memories
Stamped with your name
Three letters I wish spelled something simpler
I-O-U
Do you know why, the leaves tip-toeing across the sidewalk square know your name?
I’ll tell you now, you’ve never met.
I think that they heard
I think that they heard,
When I politely asked the world to stop spinning.
Just so for a moment
We could turn ourselves back around
Grasp our hands together
Look up and tell the stars, “I’m ready.”
The leaves know your name because the trees speak silence in the same language as us.
I don’t know how to ask you
If you are afraid, that when the world starts spinning again…
We may just float away?
I won’t let you float away.
I will dig my heels into the soil beneath our souls
I will tie the big dipper around my waist and anchor it to the trunks of the trees
I will tell gravity to stop panicking and just let go
Gather the constellations and planets
On the tail end of an inhalation
Allow the breadth of the galaxies to rise with the lungs of a sleeping dreamer's chest,
Just breathe.
I will send you these words until the day I die
Then I will paint them in the sky.
I paused mid-kiss
To look you in the eyes
You asked me what,
But you knew what.
You knew that somewhere…
A star had imploded
Mountains had moved
A first breath had been taken
The earth had shaken
A tree had fallen and made no sound
Birds had sung hymns
The wind had blown whispers of wildflowers
Soft as your fingertips tracing my arm
You knew
That somewhere in the infinity of your irises
Implausibly intricate
Strands of dawn-dewy webs
Were being woven
Between your soul and mine
But all you could manage was
“What?”
And all I could do was smile.
As I am running away from you it is as if the words you’ve stifled explode into sparks
I try to catch them in my fingers
They burn
Sweet heat and escape.
I know your rough palms
Only by the breadcrumbs you scatter for sparrows on sidewalk squares
The chattering of little birds
The best reminder of avian-toed patterns that etched themselves into the corners of her perfect eyes
When you hummed her words that could best be rendered
By a handful of scattered grains,
Learning to sing.
