I was in your backseat watching city lights curve along the car. You brought your guitar to the beach that night. I sat on the rocks and set seashells aside while the sea heard you sing. Even the things that never sleep need a lullaby sometimes.
I wondered if I was falling in love with you, but,
I know that would be untrue, because there is nothing left on earth that I could begin to care to hold onto - I’ve absolutely and unabashedly already let go
I wondered then if you can still call it falling if there’s no ground to find your feet this time?
I know that I should feel fear in the unending azure of this atmosphere - but oh darling, the breeze beneath my flight is bright blessed breath
I wondered if sinking into this sweet certainty is how you can be sure you’ve found it, and,
I know.
The end of a thousand years saw our bodies become
We were always born to begin
I have been certain before
Of only a few solitary things
That the choice to believe is brave
And calloused hands are her favorite warriors
That discomfort is a gateway to guidance
Lean over its lip and you can touch your truths scattered scarlet in the sand
That bathing in the autumn blaze of birch groves
Will wash the world till all that remains is your soul - standing strong, sacred, and blessedly unbroken
I have known how to hope and hold what’s heavy and heal
But I have never before known you.
This library lies somewhere in the spaces between pretty paper pages and the holiest heart of the woods where they grew.
All I want is to be the ladder you grow on.
My heart has a seam-ripper I’m longing to lose.
Whenever I worry what might come next
I take my heart for a walk in these woods
The order here unfolds without conjectured concern or questions of being
Relentless rhythms born only of trust in tomorrow’s transience
There is a voice in my chest that, too, knows such truths
She speaks her spells aloud in song, their melodies washed in the still-water silence of starlight
I can’t say if another sun will rise, or what those hours may hold, but,
With unwavering wonder at what light has already found me this day,
I will do all I can to grow, all according to purpose; not plan.
I’ll meet you in the dark tonight
Patiently pour over the shelves of my sanctuary, all honey-kissed parchment and gathered earth
Which treasure might best guide your way through these saturnine shadows?
With reverence resounding, my fingers will come to cradle what I could not sooner give
I remember you, I’ll say with a smile to its sentient shine
Are you ready to rise?
Auroral and alabaster as an everlasting ember
I’ll let that light loose to your sight
Do you know what I know now?
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.
Every 7 years they say your cellular composition will be entirely renewed
I have 1356 days left until you've never touched my skin
But this heart?
This heart was never yours.
When the day comes where I find you,
I’ll lead you to the back porch where we can sigh with the stars.
I’ll dip my fingers in their milky haze until the galaxies cling to my fingers with unrelenting attachment - art class glitter and glue.
I’ll unfold our clenched palms like the tattered, dog-eared, so-loved collection of glovebox atlases that they are.
I’ll hold my sparkling skin against yours to repair a rift and light our way -
Until we both know the road home by heart.
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
Go ahead and imply - I’ll confirm, coy and confident
There is no "if” here, love
The only time that I hung that word in my heart for you, I wondered,
What might be lost if we don't leap?
I fell and I found this,
Pretty-pressed in the pages of woodland walks and eyes that swallow me whole
Sun-kissed constellations at the nape of your neck and kisses that constantly curl at the corners
Promises felt like patches till today
We can build our home here - safe and strong and sacred
Tether today to tomorrow with a daisy chain
Hang that wreath on the door so the whole world knows
Whichever way you want to wander,
You can plan on me.
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.
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.