It can be so small, what saves me.
Like the crow that arrives every day
in the same green spot in the yard.
Like the baby bunny that lives
beneath our porch who locks eyes
with me every morning.
Like skinny dipping with Corinne
in a frigid alpine lake. Bite of radish
just picked from the garden.
Scent of wild roses on the trail.
It does not make sense that pleasures
so small could somehow stand up
to a ransacked heart, and yet
when I hear the whir of hummingbird wings
or see the tiny purple of a Lady Slipper
rising out of the dirt,
I notice the dogged joy in me,
how it glimmers against the dark
like the shooting star I saw tonight,
long and brilliant and red,
or like the owl in the spruce trees
that with only a handful
of low and sonorous notes,
redefines the night with song.