Because people want to save you from things
discomforts, disasters
what they imagine are the avoidable risks
but that morning in the drizzle
I set out anyway
and as I rode, those sweet drops
took down down the spring blossoms
like confetti,  like a quiet little parade
like a blessing
just for me.

Improbably, we shared the span of a television stage –
a cheerful, anonymous kitchen, a white screen backdrop projected
with a cartoon sun, an over-plump and vaguely therapeutic couch
with pillows propped pert at the corners like little soldiers.
Yet this is how it always is, isn’t it? These strange accidents
we barrel into, thin slices of our quiet stories intersecting.
I sat waiting my turn to tell mine, as the blender whirred with tomatillos
and a bronzed woman became even bronzer and the hosts worked their smiles
for the camera, and outside the rain made a clean slate of the new month
and a bloom rose from a waking flower and everything changed and nothing changed at all.

the beginner

Because in the morning, you collide with a new set of circumstances
which may or may not fix the ones that closed your last day.
Because while you were sleeping, your body replenished its cells,
including the ones you were hoping would be gone by the time you woke.
Because the weather is unpredictable, despite your best efforts at shelter,
and because you have an uncanny ability to unremember the mud puddle
you’d already stepped in, and your feet gravitate again toward the mess of it.
Your innocence is a constant interruption. You are always returning to the back
of the line somewhere, your tail between your legs. But that’s the gift of the beginner.
How the muscle pushing back the world can’t stop itself from getting thinner. 

write yourself here

On a river in Georgia, paddling past question marks. On a park bench in Jersey, starting from empty.
The Starbucks in Chelsea amid a collision of coffee orders. The apartment where an uncle lived
when he was still alive, and how it still smells like yesterday. The first rock climb of the season.
The last pound of the diet. In the gridlock of indecision. In the freefall that previews every courage.
Write yourself here. Make a strike with your pen. Look the words dead in the eye.
See how the ink makes it suddenly real, how that slight indentation in the paper where the letters
have made their new home have given you one, too. Believe it. Where you have found yourself
is exactly where you need to be, and the line breaks and the smudges and double-spaces
and misspellings are right where you need to be, too. Stop telling yourself you made any mistakes.
You didn't. You didn't.

stolen hour

This isn’t time for the miraculous, for life to shift from some tectonic fracture
into greatness. This isn’t the tunnel to shimmy into transformation, no baptismal wash
to hasten glory. This is four o’clock in the afternoon, heating leftover
rice, putting the water on for tea, the sky on mute, the kids next door practicing lay-ups.
The daisies are still holding steady from three days ago, though the slightest wilt
encroaches their tips, a slow turn only they could know the feeling of. Something
is always changing but we beat back the tide every day, the army at full tilt.
So it’s easy to misread this pocket of minutes, imagine them replete with journeying,
a deep, electric, forward motion. Rest easy. This is not a call for re-invention,
All time asks for is attention

I know nothing about geese

I know nothing about geese, only saw them landing
at the outer edge of the pond sometime around noon
while I was walking the perimeter of the field in orange sandals.
I want to say they were “gliding” or something that says I understand
the way of birds, but I can’t say I saw how they honed in on that particular
patch of water, don’t know how, en masse, they agreed to take a break,
only that they did, and had begun a slow canoe looking for what,
I imagine, to be lunch. I was hungry and went inside to eat. Look how even without
the language to tell it, a story begins to tell itself, find threadlines and affinities.
I, too, understand nourishment. I, too, know my own wings.

this morning, with butter on my lips
 
Not brilliance, not vision, not a knowing
of any recognizable proportion, not an answer or a question
burning a hole in the front pocket, not a muse bestowing
her touch on a shoulder, not a birth following gestation,
not fresh courage or new grace, not a habit finally broken,
not new greening on a fallow story, not escape from the unfinished,
not signs that point toward summit, not a tongue for the unspoken,
or a hand that guides the knee from pavement. I wished
for all of these when waking, but a silence greeted me instead.
I drank my coffee slowly and took another bite of bread.

on the eve of Spring
 
I saw them, kissing on a sidewalk bench. I’d left the movie
with my heart in my throat, a story about beating the odds,
an impossible alliance forged from accident and luck. The way
they leaned into it, I would have said it was new, their bodies
making fervent contact, his arm clutching her shoulder blade,
her drawn knees tipped, as if drunk, into his torso. Sometimes, a moment
holds our contradictions perfectly, the tentative and unafraid,
history and hope threading in one touch. I drove on, thinking what it meant
to lean into the risk, how loving always drives the wager.
The moon was nowhere to be seen, but the stars were everywhere.

ashes of old lovers

It was a gag gift, a novelty purchased at a mid-summer tag sale.
I’d thought, originally, to send it to a friend who was trying to close
a particular chapter of history. It seemed like a fitting container, a vessel
to safeguard memory, ceramic testament to the risks she’d taken. But I suppose
I was thinking of my own stories, tales of love long gone which nevertheless
had left fragments in their wake, tiny shards of grief, dust particles of injuries
sustained by a heart waking up to its wingspan. I kept the jar in the recess
of a bedside shelf, buoyed by its hum

the language between us
 
Not in the way of verbs. Not like the exchange at the post office, the weighing in,
the request for faster service. Not like the bartender taking an order, or the saleswoman
proffering a selection of black dresses. Not like a hand rising in a classroom, the answer
tipping out of the mouth. Not like directions from the gas station attendant or
telling the time to a stranger or the pleasantries of the checkout clerk. Not like previews
in a dark movie theater, the assault of a soundtrack. Not like the stoic delivery of news
anchors or the urgings of the gym instructor or the televangelist booming from the stage.
Instead, the language between us threading through the cracks, in air and breath and page
and all the nuance of a simple, single glance. Our tongue is split in half, our body into thirds,
love pulsing in the center of it all, a beautiful failure of words.