The world taught me well to fear the dark
Now when I walk into mine, I hold hands with the trees
They tell me that if you let yourself grow where you're scared
You'll soon see how to stand strong till morning breaks
I'm getting braver in these wintering woods
One shadowy mile at a time
I'm learning that silence isn't lacking,
Its cacophony is rather deafening
But if you let the trees teach you how to listen
You can begin to parse apart its truths
So now love, what does your silence say?
Our meaning is sieved of starlight and story
Does it swallow you or does it sing?
How almost anything could happen at anytime?
And yet here we are, becoming the one that does.
The church on the corner in the Avenues has a bell that rings three minutes before each hour
The only other time I've seen God arrive so early was the morning I went West
I talked to tomorrow while the sun rose
I asked if she ever gets lonely with everyone enveloped in our amber todays
She shook her head with smiling eyes and told me about us.
Back when I knew you best, I was little and lying in an earthy bed of autumn leaves. I told you I would see you soon, someday, and that I’d write you always. I closed my eyes as the maples made haloes of the sun.
The first time I recognized your smile, you were wearing a "Vote for Pedro" teeshirt in the cafeteria. Your hair had a fringe that curled at the ends and you always ran away during the slow songs. You liked to make me laugh and that little warmth sent me wonder. When you were just him, I pulled all the pink gel pen love notes from my diary and tore them to an angry flurry. I missed you then and sent you my favorite songs on a mix CD that I drew all over with Sharpie flowers, leaving the lines empty, because I couldn’t remember your name. I knew you'd understand.
The second time, it was your strength that I saw. You were a forward on the varsity soccer team and two grades above me. You asked me to prom during AP Biology class and during the summer that you worked cutting grass at the golf course, I told you I loved you. You showed me your hiding places and asked me for mine. When you were just him, I put my corsage in a shoebox and listened to Coldplay for weeks. My roommate asked me to play some happier music. I asked you to hurry. I poured myself into poems as long as I could write, hoping they'd grow far enough from my pen to reach your heart.
The last time, I saw a glimmer of your love, and that little bit of your light was more than enough - I was so sure. I left our first date and told my mom I'd marry you one day. Six years later, I told you the very same thing while my heart screamed to stop. You played guitar in a dive bar band and always made me feel so small. When you were just him, I nearly broke under the weight of what I'd given away to the wrong heart.
So, I wrote to you. I wrote to you every day for years. I begged you to appear. I waited. I looked for you in train stations and coffee shops and on mountainsides. I prayed over the pages of each book that I read, asking if you loved those words, too - though of course, I knew you did.
Tonight, I watched the mountains make haloes of the sun. I wondered at how everything beautiful grows in circles; the seasons shaping tree trunks, the water’s surface breaking beneath stones, the orbits of moons and galaxies, the ring my coffee cup left on the table that morning, that day in the leaves reaching the moment I'll finally know.
I smiled and whispered a question to the space between us.
I waited. I wondered. I wrote to you.
I want a love like the trees and the water
I'll grow in the shapes of what moves you
This is where you'll bleed the best, he tells me
Tracing where blue beats beneath, his gaze locked on my own
But if I do my job right, it shouldn't hurt a bit.
I wonder if the first places I called “home” reminded me of you
Now I stand in this doorway, delicately tracing the frame
Everything before was your echo.
When Mister Rogers told us to "look for the helpers," I always wanted to be the one that somebody found. In some small way, then, I knew I'd never be lost.
Slip your boldest thrift shop dress over your shoulders and wonder at all the lives it may have already lived before.
Curl the corner of your mouth when you think of first kisses on porch steps, the drone of a drive-in while pinkies twine on the bumper of a rickety ride that's really more rust than baby blue.
Or maybe it was something more like today: the shy autumn breeze rowing your window on its hinge, an oar in the stream, sending gauzy ripples tangling through your hair. You sit in a slice of sunlight on a worn wooden floor, finding yourself by losing these words.
Put this away.
Ask if it knows what moments it might hold you in.
Ask your skin the same question.
Curl the corner of your mouth and carefully paint rouge between two laughing lips because that little girl loved everything bright. And, since soft smiles have never been what you're known for,
Always choose the red.
I switch on each lamplight to keep me company. Maybe I can find faith in some solitude. Maybe I can pray.
Do you suppose we’ve ever stood in the same storm?
And did you also count the spaces between light and sound?
I used to say “Mississippi” with molasses on the tip of my tongue
Slow enough to pull the rove of pouring close
That soak of summer would loll sweet down my cheeks
The sharp smell of static and some green fever of faith
I held hard to this small giddy wonder at the notion
That the longest river I’ve ever seen with my own two eyes
Let me keep time - to what maybe, just maybe,
Touched you, too.
When I started feeling growing pains I went to the greenhouse and bought a big basket of plants. When I water them now, I remember to sip my coffee a little slower in the mornings, to rise a little sooner, to also reach, with soft and strong and steadfast hands, for the light that makes me whole.
This is the solace of hands holding thread - the ones you thought were your last, that you’ll soon learn aren't here to break, but to mend.
Could you feel the weight of wondering then?
Coffee cups, kisses, and promises -
The things I press my lips to and ask to stay.
I make too much some days to make meaning, too.
I am never going to forgive you.
But that’s okay.
Because now that I know, I can forgive myself.
—
Forever and Always,
A Liar
My path disturbed a flurrying galaxy of tiny white moths
Their upwards loft shifted my vision of resemblances
All at once bounding from the starstruck hush of snowstorms to something I can only describe as keenly akin to falling in love
Their giddy hopeful flourish enveloped and entranced me
But with my next step,
They were gone.
You would love who I have become
But I had to leave you to be anything at all
Bittersweet, those bits
So much of me you never knew,
So much more you’ll never know.
You hung a hole in the drywall just to see your own strength
When you finally showed me that fist, I scattered seeds where you left me empty
They still root and reach for both soil and sun
True fortitude needs only to be known, to be seen.
Somewhere between the silent beads of sweat shivering along my wearily wanting pulse
And the cool cooing miracle of a mourning dove rousing these days at dawn
I heard the switching swish of your footfalls finding their place in a promise
Knew the orbit of your most dazzling dreams and how they hung about your Sunday slumber like a mobile of tomorrows to be
The first time something broke, I begged worlds to turn their twirl and place pieces back together
The last time something broke, I learned that some things are never meant to be whole
I saw your light howling in a sea of healing halves before I was ready to believe
But, a wise woman in the woods once said to save some space in your soul for what you least expect to find
So now, what shall we call a beginning that's always been before?
The absolute entirety of a revolving resolution?
Our name is the slow-grown embrace of paper birch bodies
Their boughs ripe with rich nectar of never-ending stories finally found
These wonder-warm windows are a wild welcome home.
