I wrote the vows you’ll never hear on the nape of your neck
Your eyes always were in the back of your head
- Don't do this to her, too.
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.
I’ve been pouring poetry into the space between my palms
I find prayers most powerful when spoken in flower petals
Wild is how they were born to be.
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.
In my sleep I go swimming
With legs wound in linen
I ask you to dance
I know you knew
I never wanted you to sleep out on that broken spring sofa
In a musty house of unshaved boys and stale pingpong beer
Your old guitar in the trunk of your beat up baby
All I ever wanted screaming someday songs in the fast lane up route one
Take me down, honey, tear me up
Tunnel this tree to hollow then light me a way
Forgot your goodbyes that morning but still left a letter
Didn’t say much but I tried so hard to pencil it in
Anyways, always were stealing my sketchpads, my charcoals, my heart,
Does it really take your telescope to see?
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
Your skyline might look like the stars ignited
In the heat of a million beating hearts racing the dark
Becoming a brightness broken by buildings so tall they disappear
Your skyline might look like star shine on red rocks
So bright that when you stand before dawn and God with a camp mug in your hands,
The Milky Way can practically cream your coffee
I’m certain I don’t know
But I believe in imagination,
and sometimes believing is seeing.
This brook mirrors heaven and it knows how to sing
The stones we skip birth a tip-toed web of constellations
Light as lips breathing secrets on autumn air
Dancing and dizzy till the weight of wonder swallows them whole
Moonlight spills soft and heavy on the precociousness of these promises
Sweet as warm milk and honey
Poured from a polished porcelain pitcher
With a nick in its neck and those painted petals
Love me now and love me knots
My garden blooms for bare feet alone
In the cradling arms of mystic meadows and missteps
I wish I couldn’t see through you
The greedy little hands of water reach like lovely longing
Beguile each beam till they tangle together
Igniting a druzy drizzle of refracted light
Brighter than stars, this moment will be
As you were and as you are
Close your book on my questions
Till they are pretty-pressed and sweet forever
Light as lips breathing secrets in buttercup breaths
When your yesterdays fall from the pages,
Remember me in kaleidoscope color
Like moonbeams on the babble of brook stones
Like petals pinwheeling to our feet
Like perfect painted porcelain pieces
Like always was a place we were.
Blooming like the blush of early skies
I sat cross-legged in the meadow we made
Bare feet and that old floral dress
I strung a necklace from the beads of dew
I painted my cheeks the sweet rose of skies
Played make believe that you were there
Poured a cup of tea in chipped china
Sipped slowly while daytime sunk soft behind the gloried green hills
In the sheer golden nonsense
Of falling suns and rising stars
Of beating hearts
Born from the fiery dust
Of that very same light,
I see you.